Propofol. It can only be administered via IV and it’s white, so couldn’t be mixed into a drink without making it look really weird.
I can’t be intubated while unconscious. I had a really good anesthesiologist who kept me well asleep for the two hours they tried, though. It took the head of the department (and fifth anesthesiologist to try) to figure out I have to be awake in order to “help” and use a pediatric tube. Sucks. No elective surgery for me! (but a different set of preanesthetic drugs would be given to make me properly loopy but awake - not something I’m looking forward to - hoping I’ll never need to)
But I know about the propofol because we use it on the veterinary side for intubation and short procedures under 10 minutes where the patient can’t be twitching like they would with some other sedation drugs. It has to be given slowly and carefully dosed by weight or it causes respiratory suppression and the patient can stop breathing. (what happened to Michael Jackson)
I don’t have any real guesses as far as the OP, but I do wonder about veterinary drug Telazol (tiletamine/zolazepam).
All right, I know that there was a sleeping pill, Quaalude (methaqualone) that was around in the '70s and for awhile after that (maybe still). I don’t know if it could be slipped into a drink, but I can attest that the thing worked really fast. The first time I took one I took it, went into the bathroom and was barely able to get through brushing my teeth before it hit, and I barely made it to bed. Like, 5 minutes at the very most.
In some of those cases, though, it sounds like he offered pills, and they took them.
There were also sleeping pills of various colors. Red capsules, pink and white capsules, yellow capsules. Most of those also worked pretty quickly unless you had built up a tolerance.
The drink in question was cappuccino. Might not look so weird then. My assumption is that the accuser (Beverly Johnson?)'s memory of the time frame was out of whack decades after the fact.
That depends very much on the individual. I was up “fresh” after Ambien. I can even take 2.5mg if I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep, and feel fine four hours later. Restoril makes me feel hung-over, and can make me want to sleep nine or ten hours. It’s a weekend-or-call-in-sick only drug for me. I have taken it in desperation after three or four days of only three hours of sleep a night, though, and it used to be in my arsenal of PRNs, but it isn’t anymore, not since I discovered that a low dose of a very new anti-seizure medicine, taken around 6pm, and 5mg of melatonin at 9pm has me sleeping pretty much like a normal person as long as I stick to a schedule (10:30pm to 7am-- 8 hours, with a buffer to get up and pee once, and get back to sleep). I also get a small amount of caffeine first thing in the morning, and it keeps me from getting tired and wanting a nap in the afternoon, or getting a headache later, and going to sleep after taking something for a headache.
I can also attest that there are inhaled anesthetics that knock you out in seconds, because when I had to be put out for my c-section, because the epidural that had been restarted wasn’t kicking in fast enough, the doctor announced that per earlier plan, they were going to put me out, and lowered a mask. I don’t even remember it touching my face. I saw it coming, but my last memory, it was still five inched away. The next thing I knew, my husband was leaning over me and assuring me that the baby was fine, and he handed me a Polaroid. Then he said I couldn’t see the baby right away, because he needed to be in an isolette for a few hours. I nodded and fell back asleep, because while my husband was talking, the doctor was giving me a last dose of morphine through the IV, and hooking me up to a fetanyl machine with a self-dosing button.
Don’t most “date rape” drugs have effects similar to alcohol, just stronger and/or quicker? Many people claim to be able to detect intoxicating effects from alcohol fairly quickly, though one wonders how much of that is psychosomatic. And on the other hand, the symptoms of date rape drugs being similar to alcohol could also mean that a person might misidentify a drink as being adulterated, when it was just a plain alcoholic beverage that was stronger than the imbiber expected.
Drugs like Rohypnol (Roofies) cause amnesia as well. You have to drink a lot of alcohol to not know what you did last night. I think even a light weight drinker could manage a half a glass of drink that was far too strong and still remember the night (even if they weren’t fully in control of themselves). Besides, once you start filling someone’s glass with Everclear or 191 instead of the Cosmo they ordered, most people are going to notice the difference and have trouble choking it down.
My father took GHB (Xyrem) orally for narcolepsy with cataplexy and his doctor instructed him to take it while sitting on the edge of the bed ready for sleep. As I recall it really was fast acting enough that he didn’t have time to be any further from bed. I don’t know how precise the dosage needed to be for safety, or if his narcolepsy significantly impacted its speed. He was able to self administer it even after he had mild dementia so I don’t think it meets **Shagnasty’s **definition of needing to be “carefully controlled” but that’s debatable.
The quote was just that she could tell she was drugged by the 2nd sip. If I meet someone for a drink socially it could easily be 5 minutes before I take 2 sips. I don’t mean to nitpick, but in my opinion “by the 2nd sip” could easily mean 5-10 minutes. What does it mean to you?
[QUOTE=Shagnasty]
I don’t know what you are referring to.
[/QUOTE]
Bill Door, I think you’ve been whooshed. I think one of the features of Versed is that it also is an “amnesiac”. (I’m not sure if I’ve got the right form of that word.) It has a side effect of memory loss during the time you are on it.
On the other hand, people are also notoriously bad at counting the number of drinks they had. “I only had one drink” could easily mean “…that was re-filled five times that night, and followed by another three more that I don’t remember drinking”.
Mine too. It’s very easy to see things on TV and conflate them with actual memories. I have a crystal clear memory of crawling under the kitchen sink to retrieve a can of Heinz baked beans when I was three. Turns out I liked baked beans when I was three but it was a kid in an advertisement who crawled under a sink to get them.
Not to answer for Shagnasty, but how many “sips” are in a normal drink? 20? If we use that number I just pulled out of my ass, then 1 crushed up pill mixed in a drink will result in 1/10th of a dose being delivered in 2 sips. I’m not a pharmacologist, but I wonder if that would result in any appreciable affect. Alternately, you could crush up 10 pills in order to deliver 1 dose in 2 sips, but I’d gather that the drink would be cloudy and taste funny. Plus you run the risk of killing them if they slam the whole drink.
I am willing to suppose that many drugs are abused (used on one’s self or others) by many who are not fully cognizant of the risks they are taking. Many still abuse medications “knowing” the risks, but feel that those risks don’t apply to them. Fortunately, much of the time, even risky behavior does not have to end poorly.
I’m guessing that in cases where this is done, the dosage just needs to be strong enough to weaken inhibitions, not induce unconsciousness. Probably nothing that has to be carefully calibrated or titrated beyond “keep her drinking until she yields or is incapable of refusing”.
BTW, I was told that the classic Mickey Finn (“knockout drops” used on Sam Spade was chloral hydrate. That is pretty fast acting alone, prob worse with alcohol. I’m sure it is none too safe, but these were criminals, not anesthesiologists.
Tintin, another fictional character, was regularly put under with chloroform when he was lucky, with a blow to the head most other times.
