Motives for Drugging: Compliance, Grievance, Identity, or Just for Laughs

• In Event: Drugging Victimization and Perpetration: Various Approaches and Findings

Abstract

We used the Theory of Coercive Action (Felson, 2004) to categorize the motives of individuals who had drugged others (i.e., administered a drug to someone without their knowledge or consent, often by putting it in their drink). Using data from in-depth semi-structured interviews, we examined the motives of 14 young adults (11 male, 3 female) who drugged others. The most frequent motive was Excitement and involved men drugging their male friends “for fun” in a party context. This motive was exclusively male; no women described this motive for drugging others. The second motive was Compliance, i.e. drugging someone to make them comply with the drugger’s goals. An example of this is a man who gave his male friend Valium to make him pass out because the friend was drunk and obnoxious (i.e. yelling, throwing things). The third motive was Grievance, drugging someone for punishment or to restore justice. For example, one woman drugged her husband because she was upset with him. The last motive was Identity, drugging someone to assert one’s status in the social group. The Identity motive was closely related to masculinity, and often involved men pranking a friend by drugging him and then laughing at his reactions.

Authors

• Suzanne Swan, University of South Carolina

• Nicole Lasky, Northeastern State University

• Bonnie S. Fisher, University of Cincinnati