Mass. DPH says drink-spiking test kits fall short as prevention method

Massachusetts public health officials say they do not recommend the state distribute test kits as a way to curb incidents of people spiking bar patrons' drinks with drugs.

In 2023, the Legislature asked the state's Department of Public Health to examine and report back on ways to prevent the insidious crime of drugging people in public, often to further harm or sexually assault them. Roughly $150,000 was set aside in fiscal year 2023-2024's budget for the department to do so.

A Boston police spokesperson said 107 cases involving spiked drinks were reported in 2023 in the city, and local media detailed the growing concern among nightlife crowds. Police said reports of drink-spiking in 2024 dropped to 71 in Boston. However, as with sexual assaults, it's likely incidents in which people are drugged inside bars and clubs are underreported.

In a legislative report released publicly in December, health experts said evidence shows there are too many variables with the use of personal test kits for them to be foolproof at preventing patrons from being drugged at bars.

It describes how personal test kits can give incorrect results and are difficult to implement on a broad scale due in different environments (for example, some might work only in glasses or in plastic cups).

The report provided little in terms of short-term recommendations to help people protect themselves. Instead, state officials outlined support for efforts like public awareness campaigns about nightlife safety and training for those in the hospitality industry to interrupt potential assaults.

"Overwhelming evidence shows that misogyny, toxic masculinity, and sexism are root causes behind sexual violence, particularly in [nightlife] establishments, and require responses that support culture change," the report stated.

Health officials looked at tools like strip tests and ones that use nail polish to detect substances in drinks, and said research on their efficacy was limited. They also noted the test kits could not serve as a "durable" strategy to curb drink spiking without a plan to train hospitality staff to use them.

The health officials recommended against bulk-purchase and distribution of personal test kits. (In May 2023, state senators had pushed for funding specifically for personal test kits to get distributed at nightlife venues. A spokesperson for the Department of Public Health said they were never purchased.)

Some medical professionals and advocates against sexual violence said they supported the state report's findings.

Dr. Peter Chai, a toxicologist at Mass General Brigham who was not involved in the legislative report, said personal test kits are not reliable. He explained that, to make kits affordable, many commercial manufacturers build tests that look for only part of the chemical structure of drugs commonly used to spike drinks. This means unrelated drugs can produce false positives, or a low concentration of the drug can lead to a false negative.

Instead of relying on these kits, he said, people who believe they've been drugged should report alleged crimes to the police and go to a hospital for evaluation by medical professionals.

“We use these kind[s] of test clinically in the hospital," he said. "Most of them have been vetted and tested, and we know how they operate."

Chai added that people should get tested as soon as possible after a suspicious incident. He said many of the drugs used to spike drinks have a "short half-life," meaning they can be quickly eliminated from the body.

Hema Sarang-Sieminski, executive director of Jane Doe Inc., a Massachusetts nonprofit that advocates for survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence, said it's helpful for the the state to draw attention to the root causes of sexual assault.

" It's really important to highlight particular patterns of emerging ways of perpetrating sexual assault," she said, and it's "equally, if not more important to understand why that might have happened in the first place."