Cool, very cool. My only hope is that if this testing system is available and simple that people will actually use it and hopefully it won't be so expensive as to be cost prohibitive for people that drink every weekend or more.

this is merely a tool, the real problem is rapists and the fact that women in our society accept (and blame women for) rape, despite all efforts to educate and build self-esteem.

ANY boy who puts roofies into someone's drink should be reviled and despised by all his friends. Is he? No, they pat him on the back and say 'good one.'

Why is being gay cause for hazing and torment from male peers, but date rape isn't?

Sickening machismo of America.

This seems like a misguided effort to me. It may make you feel safer to arm your daughter with pepper spray and rohypnol detectors, but only a tiny minority of rapes involve strangers and/or date rape drugs. These things will do nothing to protect her from the most likely perpetrators, whose weapons include opportunity, plain old alcohol, and a culture that doesn't respect a woman's personal agency.

Yes it would be a shame to have to choose between the detectors and that third bottle of Quervo.

I think keeping your drink in your hot little hand, and paying attention to the people you surround yourself with, is a better (and cheaper) solution.

I see completely wasted women all alone all the time and I always wonder the same thing: where are her friends? If someone drugged me it would take my friends about 10 seconds to realize something bad had happened and someone would take me home or drive me to a hospital.

In some places in Europe, bars use beer mats that have are made of that kind of paper.

ANY boy who puts roofies into someone's drink should be reviled and despised by all his friends. Is he? No, they pat him on the back and say 'good one.'

That's absurd, and frankly more than a little sexist on your part. For your information, the vast, vast majority of men have no tolerance whatsoever for rapists.

Sorry Pyrian, but if the VAST majority of men have no tolerance for rape + molestation, why are there so many victims?

Children molested at a rate of 1 in 4, college women raped at a rate of 1 in 20 -- that doesn't sound like the vast majority of men are intolerant of this happening, since the VAST MAJORITY of perpetrators ARE men. If every vic has a different perp, that puts the rate of molesters and rapists at 28.5% of the total population. These people do it because they believe they can get away with it, or believe it's their 'right,' Now where would they get THAT idea?

If anyone here is sexist, it's you for denying that a culture of machismo, misogyny and 'praise the raping jocks, punish the vicitim' exists in America. Just turn on the TV to see what I'm talking about.

I REALLY hope you are a guy, because then your attitude of denial -- while reprehensible -- is at least to be expected. If you're a gal, god help any daughters you may have.

"Don't worry dear, the vast majority of men are intolerant of rape, so don't worry about bad touch -- good touch. It won't happen to you"

If every vic has a different perp...

If every victim had a different perpetrator, you'd be living on another planet. The 1-in-4 statistic is unsupportable, the presumption of individual perps is flat-out retarded (sex crimes have extremely high recividism rates), leaving a tiny fraction of a percent of the population as criminals. And if they're bragging about it, it sure as heck isn't to me or to any of my friends, who wouldn't hesitate to turn them in.

"Don't worry dear, the vast majority of men are intolerant of rape, so don't worry about bad touch -- good touch. It won't happen to you"

You know what? You are sick. You are a sick excuse for a human being. I mean, it's bad enough to bring in a strawman argument (I'm all for people and children taking steps to protect themselves), but this is beyond any sense of decency or decorum.

So, I'm not going to dignify your nonsense with anything more than this: When you conflate and incriminate an entire gender, you are being a rank sexist pig, even if your target gender is male.

Pyrian, no one is going to say they like rape. Ask them what exactly is and is not rape, however, and it becomes a lot clearer how rape can be as prevalent as it is. We think of rape in terms of monsters in bushes and smarmy creeps dropping drugs into your drink, and there are plenty of rapists who use the fact that they did not employ these tactics to comfort themselves (and their friends and loved ones) into believing that they did not rape anybody. That's not the legal truth or the ethical truth, but it's a fiction that plenty of people hide behind and it is overwhelmingly women who pay the price.

I would guess that the vast, vast majority of stranger rapes are committed by a tiny sliver of the male population, and that pedophiles are an even smaller group, because these people are almost never caught, almost never found guilty, and get insanely short prison sentences. They may commit upwards of 30 rapes in a lifetime.

Acquaintance rape is fuzzier, because that's the area where normal men may convince themselves they were entilted, she wanted it, they did nothing wrong. Even then, though, the kind of man who may date-rape one woman will probably rape another.

Unless a woman is sexually molested, abused in a domestic violence context, or trafficked, it's unlikely for that 1 in 4 to be raped more than once or twice in her life. So if we have 12% (25% of 50%) of the population experiencing rape, but for each perp there are 30 victims and they rarely overlap, this suggests that the ratio of rapists to the rest of the population is about 0.4%, or 1/30th of 12.

Let's cut the recidivism rate to a fifth of what we suggested to account for acquaintance rapists committing fewer average rapes and some women being raped by multiple perpetrators... we're assuming now the average rapist only rapes 6 different people in his life... and we're still at 2% of the population, or 4% of all men.

So no. Men are not rapists, any more than men are gay. There *are* gay men, and there are rapist men. But the fact that almost all rapists are men obscures the fact that only a tiny proportion of men are rapists.