Spiked Drink & KNOAP: Preventing Date Rape

Spiked Drink


We would assume that 99.9 percent of people are decent humans who would never do something as vile as spiking somebody elses drink. Unfortunately, new research suggests otherwise.

A new study published in the journal Psychology of Violence surveyed 6,000 students from three different colleges in the United States and found that the use of beverages is not as rare as you would expect. Overall, 462 students - about 8 percent - said they're pretty sure their drinks were roofed, Xanax, or God knows, at some point.



Does alcohol harm the memory?

If a high consumption of alcohol can cause a marginal and minor loss of episodic memory (the one that allows the recall of autobiographical events), regular and excessive consumption produces effects as long lasting as disastrous .



Memory disorder and chronic alcoholism

A chronic alcoholic can present disorders of his episodic memory which belongs to the long-term declarative memory system. It may indeed be difficult to remember episodes directly autobiographical or related to his life course. He can also be victim of alterations of his short memory, known as work. Saving a name, a phone number, an address for immediate action, sometimes becomes problematic.



There is therefore a very real link between alcohol consumption and progressive development of memory impairment (or memory impairment).

Finally, it must be remembered that if this link is unmistakable, it is not necessarily correlated with the patterns of alcohol consumption: daily quantity, duration of the alcoholic state or age of the patient at the beginning of his addiction . Each person reacts in his own way.

Alcohol every day

If excessive alcohol consumption can lead to significant memory problems, moderate consumption can, on the contrary, produce beneficial effects.

Studies, especially of subjects over 50 years old, have shown that people who drink daily but moderately have higher learning abilities than those who drink sober.

In other words, if drinking too much carries a risk for the memory, abstinence does not present any particular advantage compared to a moderate consumption.


Korsakoff syndrome



The Korsakoff syndrome is the leading cause of severe memory impairment in chronic alcoholics.

As a result of Gayet-Wernick's disease, encephalopathy characterized by serious neuropsychological disorders that can lead to death, Korsakoff syndrome appears in 80% of cases in alcoholic patients.

Patients do not memorize events or information. Struck with a sometimes severe amnesia, the patients willingly fabricate by compensating for their lack of memory by the construction of an imaginary reality.