New cups alert drinkers to presence of date rape drugs

It’s been years since the first warnings against colorless, odorless, tasteless “date rape” drugs, and now one man is turning to tech to try and stop them.

Michael Abramson first became motivated to create a counter-measure against the drugs after he was drugged at a friend’s birthday party. Abramson had just taken his first sips of his first drink that night when he became sick and disoriented as if he had been drinking all night. 

Though about nine in 10 sexual assault victims are women, cases like Abramson’s show that men are also at risk.

“Certainly in my case it could be because I was a target of being robbed or it could have been as simple as I got somebody else’s drink so it was meant for somebody else,” Abramson said.

His new company, DrinkSavvy, is marketing cups and straws that can detect date rape drugs. If a drug is introduced into a beverage, the cup and/or straw changes color to alert the drinker.

Abramson said the detector cup was the easiest and most effective way to keep party-goers safe, though he had at one point considered a pill that would neutralize date rape chemicals when dropped into a drink.

“If the same cups, straws and stirrers and glassware that you’re drinking from already is also the indicator that would change color if somebody drugs your drink, well then you’ve got continuous, effortless and discrete monitoring of your drink throughout the entire night,” Abramson said.

DrinkSavvy recently completed a successful IndieGoGo fundraising campaign that raised more than $52,000 in 45 days. Abramson expects initial prototypes to be available in September and for the products to be commercially available sometime in 2014.

Abramson thinks that once DrinkSavvy is introduced, many bar-goers will demand the product from their establishments. 

“The ability to be able to discern which bars and clubs were using the DrinkSavvy products and which ones were not. Certainly I think it would be a little curious if you have two bars on a street — one is using the DrinkSavvy products and one isn’t — it might be a little to the patrons as to why does this bar care particularly about our safety and this one doesn’t,” he said.

And while Abramson is confident in his product’s ability to keep people safe from drug-toting predators, he said the best defense is for people to be aware of their own safety.

“Everybody should always act as if they did not have a DrinkSavvy product that they were using, you always have to be vigilant. There’s no 100 percent effective foolproof anything,” he said.