145 people at France music festival report being pricked with syringes after online calls to target women

www.cbsnews.com 145 people at France music festival report being pricked with syringes after online calls to target women

French authorities detain 12 people after 145 revelers across the nation reported being in pricked with syringes during the Fete de la Musique national music festival.

French police have detained 12 suspects after 145 people reported being pricked with syringes during the country's annual street music festival, officials said Sunday.

Millions of people took to the streets across France on Saturday evening for the Fete de la Musique, with authorities reporting "unprecedented crowds" in Paris.

Before the party, posts on social media had called for women to be targeted during the festivities.

World News @lemmy.world

145 people at France music festival report being pricked with syringes after online calls to target women

www.cbsnews.com /news/france-music-festival-syringe-pricking-online-calls-target-women/

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Updated: toxicology reports have all come back negative for anything.
I don't have a quality source because I don't know how to search for French stories but there was some English coverage on a podcast.
If anyone has a quality report showing the toxicology results or the outcomes or updates on any of the arrests I'd love to see them.

Tangentially, I was chatting with the owner of my local pub in Boston recently, and apparently it’s become something of a game (?!?!?!?!?) to try to slip people mickeys around here. As in, just see if you can sneak it into the drink, with no real intent of abuse or rape or whatever - just to see if you can do it.
I fucking hate humans sometimes.
- Is that what they say once they get caught, or do they tell that story just in case they get caught in the future?
  
  No idea. If I caught someone doing it, I wouldn’t talk to them about what their rationale was. I’d throw my beer at them and then yell for the bouncer that some guy was trying to slip shit into drinks.
  
  There are many more dumb assholes than rapists. I believe people who do this just for fun, not for rape, do exist. It's quite terrible anyway.
  
  "It's just a prank bro"
- Tangentially, I was chatting with the owner of my local pub in Boston recently, and apparently it’s become something of a game (?!?!?!?!?) to try to slip people mickeys around here.
  In some time periods in some places in the world, getting a hand cut off was punishment for theft. While that is a bit extreme, maybe assholes convicted of this should lose the final knuckle of their pinky finger as punishment for drugging people at bars.
  
  There is a reason civilized countries don't do punishments like this any more - they don't work.
  
  It should be something easy to see. Part of the advantage of cutting off someone's hand isn't just the punishment, it's a marker that a person is a thief that they can't get rid of. Ideally it'd be something obvious and easy to see, that's also uncommon enough naturally that you know what happened.
- Nah, plenty of SA happening in Boston bars, and has been for like 10 years now in this recent “wave” where incidents have been increasing.
  Motherfuckers just never knew how to have a good time.
- Fuck, this was happening when my younger sister was going to bars. It wasn't a thing I was aware of when I was younger. But I remember my sister saying 15 years ago that people were slipping drugs into drinks for this same reason. It was just to fuck with people
- I mean i could see this actually being a good stunt to raise awareness about it. Like use something fake and safe like a time release tablet that makes the drink fizz up suddenly 30 seconds later, or causes the whole thing to turn colour rapidly or something. But i doubt thats whats happening. Might make for a funny party theme with a close group of friends who are all in on it and targeting each other though.
  
  Doesn't matter how ineffective it might seem, that drink is getting thrown away
- What’s a mickey?
  
  Date rape drugs.
  
  A penis.
- People are giving out free drugs to anyone? Oh no! Kudos to this brave person for speaking out with no regard for what that might do to their own business.
  
  …what…?

Aside from the pricking scandal, what a fantastic idea.
On "Fête de la Musique" people are urged to play music outside.
Here my country is stuck with Christian holidays that noone remembers the meaning of.
- It’s a GREAT festival. Super fun. Every neighborhood you can just walk around and there are little stages of groups or solo musicians performing. Free and just kind of everywhere. Good vibes. Very pedestrian friendly.
  
  I do that most evenings. Around 5 pm, I sit on my porch and play my guitar, watching the pond across from my house, and listening to the birds sing.
  Sitting in a rocker on a front porch, playing guitar on a warm summer evening, is one of Life's greatest, and most perfect, pleasures.
- We also have those Christian holidays in France, and fête de la musique is just one evening, not a holiday. But it is on the longest daylight day of the year, so that's nice.

called for women to be targeted during the festivities
Do we know more? Was this supposed to just scare them or did they actually get injected with something?
- Officials did not say if these were cases of so-called needle spiking with date-rape drugs such as Rohypnol or GHB
  Some victims were taken to hospital for toxicological tests
  investigations were opened after three people... reported feeling unwell.
  
  after three people... reported feeling unwell.
  Well that's fair enough at any rate. So maybe at least this didn't get anyone seriously injured.
  
  reported feeling unwell
  Knowing what happens every year, they were drunk and paranoid.
- 10-15 years ago it was definitely a thing. I remember posts about it on reddit, back when reddit was good. Eventually after it blew up a lot of bars started doing the angel drinks or messages in the bathroom. Bunch of women were targeted
  
  Yep. In the 2000s, my town had a serious scare. I lived in a small town at the time near a major music fest, and the town handed out flyers about watching yourself because we had a bunch of roofie incidents.
  One festival mocked our town for it and called us assholes/cops. Because that festival were like pro date-rape or some shit? Festival doesn't exist anymore.
  But I'll never forget how many naive tourist girls who would get the flyer, laugh, and go, "Why would anyone do this haha!" And don't take this stuff seriously.
  I feel like social media has been a huge help at identifying shit behavior.
- Super frustrating article to read.
  
  Fucking tell me about it 😂

People have different definitions of major incidents apparently...
"including a 17-year-old who was hospitalized after being found sitting on the street with stab wounds to the lower abdomen."
"The prefect of the Paris police, Laurent Nunez, said that "no major incident has been reported.""
- A single person being stabbed isn't a "major incident" if you're the chief of police or whatever a prefect is.
  
  Prefects are appointed representatives of the state in each department. They are indeed in charge of the police, among other things.
- I believe (and hope) that it's just ambiguously written, the first part is discussing incidents throughout the country while the prefect was obviously just talking about Paris.
  A lot of oddly worded bits in that article.
  
  Journalists write like garbage these days.

Jfc what the fuck

Oh cool. We're doing another needle panic
Britian went through this just three years earlier.
Their experiences were shared on social media, along with photographs of apparent puncture wounds. Groups were formed to warn of the dangers of needle spiking, politicians called for investigations, and by February 2022, over 1,300 reports of needle spiking had been made to police over the previous 6 months (Wynn-Davies, 2022).
...
Many victims claimed they only had a few drinks and were not drunk. However, an Australian study of suspected incidents of drink spiking found that self-reports of alcohol consumption are often unreliable. One 17-year-old girl was taken to hospital after having only one glass of vodka. However, on further questioning, she ‘remembered’ having beer and whisky. The study also analyzed the blood and urine of patients who presented at hospital emergency departments. Of 97 patients, none had traces of a sedative in their systems (Quigley et al., 2009).

This is a panic that has come and gone multiple times even just during my lifetime. I remember the first time I heard about it was visitors to neighboring Tijuana with HIV infected blood on the 80s. Never once has it actually been confirmed to have happened.
These are 145 self reports. Nothing confirmed. No video evidence.
Plenty of resources available for this panic.
- Of course the 145 police reports don't count. This is 145 women were talking about.
  
  During the 80s example I gave it was men that were reporting it.
  
  Anyone can file a police report. And if they believe they were a victim then they are more likely to do that.
- Wait, are you trying to tell us that this is not true because there is no video evidence? Just hundreds of women being in panic? Wtf
  
  I'm saying that in the past every incidence or this has been alleged turned out to be mass panic. And at today's age of constant video surveillance there would be evidence, not just reports. So either this is the very first case in the world where this is actually true and we will find that out through the evidence or we're going to find out that it's not true and then it matches all the previous events. But police reports do not make something real.
  I'm asking people to look at the evidence.
- Last time I heard about this it was all over Facebook and shit.
  Then the government, police and drs came out and said there was no evidence and when you think about it it doesn't make any sense.
  Honestly how many women have you seen smash way way too many drinks and claim they got spiked. No you weigh fuck all, you were smashing drinks, thats why you can't stand. We've all drank too much.

The people planning this and walking around doing the pricking...
There's a classic death metal song by Cannibal Corpse called "Hammer Smashed Face".

And that 145 is just those who noticed. I regularly have to self administer injections and they're often nearly painless once you're used to doing it, especially with small gauge needles.

Could someone please shoot whoever wrote the headline?

I’m gonna assume it was boys doing the pricking?
EDIT: surprise! It was boys.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/23/france-syringe-attacks-street-music-festival-fete-de-la-musique

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