A new investigation by triple j Hack has revealed incidents of needle spiking at schoolies events last year on the Gold Coast and in Byron Bay. In one instance, an 18-year-old school leaver was celebrating on the Gold Coast when she started to feel strange and remembers not being able to communicate or shut her eyes.
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00:00Needle spiking is basically injecting somebody with a needle anywhere in the body, usually
00:06containing some sort of illegal substance, and it is done without their consent.
00:11So the first person we spoke to, her name is Sophie Brown.
00:14She was 18 at the time, celebrating schoolies on the Gold Coast last year.
00:18She says it was her third night out, they were just at one of the local venues, they'd
00:22been there for about 20 minutes when she started to feel symptoms.
00:25So her heart started racing, she wasn't able to shut her eyes and she also couldn't communicate
00:30with her friends.
00:31So her friends called the ambulance and she was taken to the hospital, but after waiting
00:35two hours because it was so busy, symptoms started to fade and so she went home.
00:40The reason she believes she was needle spiked is because the next morning she woke up and
00:44she had a bruise on her arm and it was really sore for a few days.
00:48We also spoke to a schoolies facilitator, Nick Pablacos.
00:51It was his sixth year facilitating events for schoolies and basically that means you're
00:56on the ground running these celebrations, making sure everyone's safe.
01:00Now he says within the space of an hour, three individuals came up to him believing they
01:04had been spiked and two of these individuals said that they actually felt a prick in their arm.
01:09So he called the police and said about eight officers arrived to the scene and took control
01:14of the situation.
01:16And thankfully in this incident they were able to remove this patron from the venue
01:21and they were left with the authorities and taken away.
01:25As for my own knowledge on what happened to this individual, I couldn't tell you besides
01:31that it was left with the authorities, but it was dealt with very swiftly and it was
01:36actually really incredible to see everyone working together quite well.
01:40So Gold Coast Health have said that there were two presentations at Emergency Treatment
01:45Centre on the Gold Coast during the schoolies period with concerns of suspected needle spiking.
01:50But both Queensland Police and New South Wales Police have said that this has never been
01:54investigated, needle spiking has never been investigated.
01:57New South Wales Police confirmed a report of drink spiking during schoolies but not
02:02needle spiking.
02:03So there are experts now who are speaking out about this, including Dr Eisen.
02:07She's a senior lecturer at La Trobe University and has focused a lot of her research around
02:13sexual violence prevention and says that this is definitely happening in Australia.