During the second week of spring term, a member of the Class of 2024 — who requested anonymity to speak candidly about her experiences — said she heard rumors of an increase in date-rape drug use, also known as roofying, around campus. This was the first time she heard such rumors, she said.
“I was having a conversation with a handful of girls in my sorority who were talking about [date-rape drug use] and kind of making jokes specifically about [a specific fraternity], but in a way that seemed like it was common knowledge — or at least something that they were all in on,” the student said.
After hearing about the potential increase of date-rape substances on campus, the student said that she realized she may have had a first-hand experience with date-rape drugs.
“As a result of that conversation and pretty much right in the middle of it, I kind of just had this flashbulb moment realizing that I had been roofied in February in [that fraternity].”
Discussion of date-rape drug use has become more commonplace across campus: Each source The Dartmouth spoke to shared that they have heard such rumors in recent weeks. Several students reported that they have heard about date-rape drug use at multiple fraternity houses.
According to College health service director Mark Reed, the term “roofie” is derived from Rohypnol, a sedative that can be easily put into drinks. However, it can also refer to GHP and a “large class of different types of sedatives” that can incapacitate or compromise people.
The scope of these discussions has extended to Greek leadership. An anonymous source from the Class of 2022, who also requested to remain anonymous to speak candidly about her experiences, said that she first heard about discussions of roofying through her Greek house during week three or four of spring term.
“We got an email from our president [which was] forwarded from [the] Inter-Sorority Council that basically said, ‘Please be aware — there’s an increase in reports of people possibly having their drink spiked. There hasn’t been reporting to the College, but there’s been an increase in reporting to Dick’s House [and Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center],’” the source said.
These discussions have been brought up in meetings between Greek houses, the Greek Leadership Council and other College bodies, according to Gamma Delta Chi fraternity president Nick Howard ’23.
“I have heard it brought up from a lot of other Greek spaces, particularly in our meetings with the GLC and some of our interactions and meetings with [the Department of Safety and Security],” as well as the Hanover Police and Fire Departments, Howard said.
Official campus sources and reports
Despite the prevalent dialogue on campus, College administrators said they have not received a substantial increase in reports of date-rape drug use compared to previous years.
Title IX coordinator Kristi Clemens said that the office has received “few reports” of date-rape drug cases. According to Clemens, most reports of potential date-rape drug use did not include reports of sexual assault.
“That’s one of the gaps for me with this. If somebody is trying to roofie you with the intention of assaulting you, they are going to stay with you until that drug kicks in — like they’ve done it for a purpose,” Clemens said. “So some of the [people who have filed reports and] who think that they were drugged were with their girl friends all night or didn’t have anything happen to them, thankfully, but still feel kind of weird.”
According to Reed, Dick’s House has seen “some increase in the last two terms” of students arriving believing they have been roofied, though these are “very small numbers.”
Official statistics from the College regarding date-rape drugs are harder to come by, for a variety of reasons, including a lack of leadership and a lack of information sharing between offices.
An anonymous student source, who works with the Sexual Violence Prevention Project and requested to remain anonymous to speak candidly about her experiences, said she felt frustrated by the lack of professional leadership in positions overseeing Greek life. She cited that there had been a number of sexual assault cases involving affiliated students over the 2021 summer term, and expressed her frustration that the Office of Greek life had just recently appointed a new director at the start of the spring term after seven months without one.
The source also said that she perceived a lack of information sharing between College offices that deal with gender-based violence.
“In general, the privacy rules regarding sexual violence and reporting make it really difficult [for offices] to share sensitive information between [each other], and DHMC is a separate institution [from the College],” she said.
A termly comparison graph from the Student Wellness Center’s website shows that from January to March 2022, there were 30 Good Samaritan calls, 22 “medical encounters for alcohol intoxication” and 53 “alcohol-related incidents” involving Safety and Security or Residential Education.
Information from 2022 was affected by “restrictions related to gatherings” and data from 2021 was also affected by “reduced number of students on campus.” Due to these circumstances, the number of reported Good Samaritan calls and medical encounters from January to March 2021 were less than five, while that same year saw 28 alcohol-related incidents.
Data from 2019 and 2018, however, show alcohol-related incident data in the absence of the pandemic. From January to March 2019, there were 27 Good Samaritan calls, 37 medical encounters and 62 alcohol-related incidents. The same time period in 2018 had 25 Good Samaritan calls, 52 medical encounters and 119 alcohol-related incidents. When compared to these two years, the winter 2022 term’s data appears to match pre-pandemic levels.
Student experiences
Despite a lack of official College reports, several students reported personal encounters with date-rape drugs on campus.
The anonymous member of the Class of 2024 who believes she was roofied in the winter said that although she typically has a “good gauge” of how intoxicated she is, she noticed atypical symptoms after drinking that night, such as feeling like she was “watching [herself] through a foggy mirror” and that her memory seemed disproportionately afflicted compared to the amount of alcohol she had consumed. She also said that, after she went to sleep, there was a moment during the night when she woke up and was unable to move her body.
“No matter how much I’ve [mentally] gone back to that night or talked about that night, [I haven’t] regained any memories, which I think is a little bit weird for blacking out,” she said.
She said she made an official report to the Title IX Office in late April; when the office responded, they said they had received no other reports regarding date-rape drug use at the time.
The anonymous SVPP student worker said that the first time she heard about instances of roofying was during the fall term, though she has friends who may have encountered roofies in the winter.
“Right at the beginning of the [winter] term, I had a couple of close friends who I was with at the time when we believe they were roofied,” she said.
The source said that to her knowledge, her friends did not receive a drug test to confirm or deny whether they had been roofied.
“It’s really difficult to access a testing kit, and there’s such a wide array of date-rape drugs. It’s really hard to even know if your testing kit [tests for all date-rape drugs], and some of them didn’t even want to confirm [if they were roofied] because that would be such a scary thing to confront,” she said. “But then, [informally], there were just more and more stories, and it felt like everyone was getting roofied.”
The anonymous member of the Class of 2022 said that earlier this term, her partner seemed heavily intoxicated during an on night at their own Greek house.
“I’ve seen them drunk plenty of times, [but] this was something different — they were just really incoherent, and I would try to talk to them, [and] they would talk about random stuff that didn’t make any sense,” the source said.
The source said that she had checked in with her partner over text about an hour before meeting up with them, and that they seemed “fine” at the time. However, when her partner woke up the next morning and could not remember what had happened after four or five drinks, she wondered if one of those drinks had been spiked.
“I know my partner, and they can have far more than four or five drinks and be fine,” she said. “And so it was that fourth or fifth drink [when] they went from being totally fine to [not] — it was like zero to 100.”
The source added that several others — both men and women — at that Greek house had “similar experiences” around the same time as her partner. Her partner got drug tested at DHMC the next day — partly because they felt extremely nauseous, and also because another student was filing a report to Title IX after similarly “blacking out” at the same Greek House the night before and was trying to provide evidence, she said.
“We went to DHMC, [they] got tested, and nothing showed up, but [the test administrator] also said that they don’t test for GHP or Rohypnol,” she said. “I’m not sure why they don’t test for them, especially because Rohypnol can stay in your system for 72 hours or something … they were testing for LSD, or cocaine or something like that.”
When students go to either Dick’s House or DHMC, they can ask to be screened for date-rape drugs, which tests for “upwards of 200 [substances],” including Rohypnol, according to Reed. He also expressed the difficulty of detecting date-rape drugs due to how quickly they metabolize — within five to 10 hours, he said.
The student’s partner did not file a Title IX report, since they “ended up okay” and the two expressed a desire to “leave [that night] behind.”
Discrepancy between campus dialogue and official reports
Some administrators suggested possible explanations for the discrepancy between campus dialogue and official College information. Reed noted that the slight increase in students visiting Dick’s House with roofie concerns follows a trend where discussions around date-rape drugs circulate “on and off for years.” He believes that the current discussion reflects this larger pattern.
“There will be periods of time where there’s a heightened concern on campus, and that will happen every few years,” he said. “Certainly we’re in one of those periods right now.”
Similarly, Clemens said that, during her time at Dartmouth, cyclical discussions of date-rape drug use have not been uncommon.
“I’ve worked at Dartmouth for 12 years and I think that different rumors come and go — that, you know, X fraternity is putting this in their batch … I think everyone is returning to normalcy, for lack of a better word,” Clemens said.
In addition, Reed noted that alcohol is the most common date-rape drug, although students often do not perceive it as such. When people are unaware of the alcoholic concentration of what they are consuming, this can catch them off guard, and alcohol will essentially function as a date-rape substance, according to Reed.
“What can also happen is that people drink out of common containers or batches, and they don't know what’s in it,” Reed said.“They can have a plastic cup and think it’s the equivalent of one or two drinks and it could really be the equivalent of six.”
According to policy chair of the Student and Presidential Committee on Sexual Assault Madeline Gochee ’23, the disconnect between officially reported date-rape drug cases and campus discussion may be attributed to students not wanting to go through the process of reporting their experiences.
“I’ve had people talk to me who believe that they may have experienced some sort of nonconsensual ingestion of a substance that then caused them to black out,” Gochee said. “But the thing is that those people have not been interested in reporting or going through that process for a variety of means.”
According to Clemens, there is a misconception that reporting to Title IX automatically prompts an investigation or forces the reporter to take further action, which Clemens said is “fallacious.” Instead, Clemens said that many students reach out to Title IX for “supportive measures,” which can include academic and residential accommodations, among other supports. When a student reports to Title IX, Clemens said that the Title IX office will either follow up with the student, or they can refer the incident to the Department of Safety and Security, depending on the facts of the individual case.
The anonymous SVPP student worker said while she acknowledges that there seems to be very few formal reports of encounters with date-rape substances made to Title IX, she hopes that the College will provide “mental health” support to students who have experienced these encounters.
“There’s not really much of an advocacy presence on campus or much activism around this, which is difficult — but there’s a huge sense of fear, I think, and also Dartmouth normalizing these attitudes,” the source said. “I think Dartmouth just really needs to step up their game.”
The authors of this article reached out to various students, campus advocates, Greek chapter presidents and employees of the College.
Representatives of the Sexual Assault Peer Alliance (SAPA) did not respond to requests for comments as of press time. SWC assistant director for violence prevention Benjamin Bradley and SWC associate director Amanda Childress did not respond to requests for comment. SWC director Caitlin Barthelmes and SWC healthy relationships and sexual health specialist Brailyn Davis declined to comment. Safety and Security director Keysi Montas did not respond to request for comment. College spokesperson Diana Lawrence did not respond to request for comment.
Greek chapter presidents — the 23 chapters that compose the Inter-Sorority Council, the Interfraternity Council and the Gender-Inclusive Greek Council, in addition to the presidents of these councils — either did not respond for request to comment or declined to comment, with the exception of Epsilon Kappa Theta sorority, Gamma Delta Chi fraternity, Phi Tau coed fraternity and Theta Delta Chi fraternity.
Production executive editor Mia Russo ’23 was not involved in the editing of this article due to a conflict of interest.
Information and resources regarding sexual violence can be found on the College’s Title IX page as well as WISE’s website.
Kristin Chapman ’24 is an English major and Spanish minor from Rye, New York. She currently serves as the editor-in-chief and previously wrote and edited for the News section. In her free time, she enjoys reading books, running, hiking and doing yoga.
Daniel Modesto ’24 is the News executive editor. He is from Brooklyn, New York, and is a Native American and Indigenous Studies major modified with Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies.
Arielle Feuerstein ’24 is an English major from Bethesda, Maryland. She currently serves as the production executive editor, and in the past, she wrote and edited for Mirror. In addition to writing, Arielle enjoys crocheting, board games and walks around Occom Pond.
