It is a substance that has come back into the news: GHB. With the phenomenon of injections, young women and men complaining of having been stung during parties and festivals, suspicion falls on “the date rape drug”, although it is not yet known which products are injected. But it’s not just with these injections that GHB gets people talking. Correspondent takes an interest in this increasingly widespread drug on Thursday evening, with a report entitled GHB: fear of Saturday night.
“We were interested in GHB because it is a product that we hear more and more about in the news”, explains to Europe 1 Eugénie Yvrande, the director of the report. “In particular, there were the Instagram ‘Drop your bar’ pages that started to emerge with a lot of testimonies of people who had been subjected to chemical submission, with the aim of either being raped or stripped. It is also a drug that is used in a festive way by consumers, it is something that surprised us a lot.”
Chemical submission and party use
Correspondent also collected the testimony of a man drugged without his knowledge by two attackers, before being stripped. They managed to get him to withdraw money, invite themselves to his house and leave with a lot of loot. A method well established and practiced for a year by these two men.
In this report, we also understand the difficulty for victims to prove the presence of GHB in their body: the substance disappears in just a few hours. Eugénie Yvrande is also interested in the festive use of GHB or rather GBL. This industrial solvent turns into GHB as soon as it is ingested. And some young people consume it voluntarily, looking for a disinhibiting, euphoric effect and a very attractive price. But the product is also very addictive.
A 26-year-old young man agreed to testify for Correspondent. “It’s the first instinct when I come home, when I leave home, whenever I have to do something. In terms of dosage, I’m at 1.5. But sometimes I even take 1.7 or 1.8, which in oneself is enormous”, he says in the report. “It’s like an energy drink, it boosts for an hour or an hour and a half.”
GHB: fear of Saturday night, report by Eugénie Yvrande, Paul de Boissieu and Jeanne Burea, is broadcast Thursday evening at 9:10 p.m. Correspondenton France 2. Also in the summary: an investigation into home deliveries and immersion in prison, in one of the largest remand centers in Île-de-France.