DEADLY "DATE RAPE" DRUGS KILL MORE THAN INNOCENCE

Candace Pruett does not remember the night she was raped.

All she knows is that she felt suddenly strange after having a soft
drink with some newly made friends and wanted to go home. Instead, she
was found unconscious by police who had been alerted by her frantic
parents.

Pruett, who was 15 at the time, was a victim of the "date rape" drug
Rohypnol.

"One of the most difficult things I had to cope with after I was raped
was my not knowing what had happened to me that night," Pruett told a
hearing on Thursday of the House Commerce oversight
subcommittee.

The hearing was called to gather evidence about such "date rape"
drugs, which include not only Hoffmann-La Roche's Rohypnol but a drug
known as GHB and the veterinary tranquilliser ketamine. They are used
not only by rapists but as recreational drugs and even diet aids.

Clear, tasteless and odourless, the drugs are easy to slip into a
drink in a frightening update of the old-fashioned "mickey finn". In
Pruett's case, it was sneaked into a Mountain Dew, a sweet, fizzy
soft drink.

"What my attacker did to me also robbed me of my childhood," Pruett,
now 18 and a high school senior in Virginia, said, her voice trembling.

A 19-year-old man was eventually convicted of raping Pruett. Other
victims died.

In 1996 Hillory J. Farias died in LaPorte, Texas after someone slipped
GHB into her soft drink at a youth centre.

Texas Democrat Sheila Jackson Lee has been pushing legislation that
would outlaw such drugs, and named a failed 1997 bill after the
17-year-old high school senior.

"She was not a drinker. She was an athlete, a volleyball player,
living with her grandmother and well-loved," Jackson Lee told the
subcommittee "It's time that the government agencies come up to the
bar. This is a deadly drug."

She also wants the bill to include requirements for educating
teenagers, parents, police and others about the drugs and their dangers.

Michigan congressman Bart Stupak, a Democrat, said he was helping
sponsor a new bill that would make it a crime to possess GHB and the
veterinary drug ketamine, also known as "special K," which is
similarly abused.

It would make them Schedule III drugs, with possession by a first-time
offender punishable by five years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

That does not satisfy Trinka Porrata, a former Los Angeles police
officer who now lectures fulltime about such drugs. She thinks it
should be designated as a Schedule I drug, which means it has no
medical value and is highly subject to abuse.

"For every rape victim out there, there are hundreds of cases of
overdose," Porrata told the hearing. People stopped for drunk driving
avoid arrest because police cannot tell they have actually taken GHB,
she added.

Porrata said the drugs are used by "Rave" and "Goth" groups and at
high school and college gatherings, by bodybuilders in gyms, by
dancers seeking a calorie-free "high" and others.

The most notorious "date rape" drug, Rohypnol, is a Schedule IV drug
and the company has started distributing a blue-dyed, salty-tasting,
hard-to-dissolve version so it can be less easily abused.

But GHB is more widely used now. The extent of the drug's popularity
can be seen by looking at an Internet site -- www.ashesonthesea.com/ghb/
- -- Porrata said.

One case detailed there is that of Caleb Shortridge of San Diego, who
died at the age of 27 last April after taking GHB with friends.

The friends, unconcerned and believing the drug harmless, kept
partying around his unconscious body, according to the report posted
by Shortridge's parents, Ken and Anya.

Finally his roommate called an ambulance.

"In the ambulance, they got a faint pulse, but it faded away. He died
on the emergency room table after frantic efforts to revive him," the
report reads.