Rash of drink-spiking incidents goes unchecked by police in Charlottetown

The first thing that roused suspicion was the timing.

Eleven of the alleged druggings happened between 2010 and 2011.

Then, there was the community. Many incidents took place within the same wide network of friends and acquaintances.

Charlottetown, a quiet provincial capital of about 40,000 people, is small. But eight of the victims were in their 20s and involved in the city's music scene.

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And, most troubling, many of the same locations kept reappearing in report after report: Baba's Lounge, Hunter's Ale House, and house parties, all located within the same six-block radius downtown.

Seventeen reports of drink spiking on P.E.I. were written in emails and messages and given to a local woman in the spring of 2021. The complainants believe that drinks were spiked with Rohypnol, a tranquilizer described as up to 10 times more potent than Valium. She pledged to them, only one of whom had reported to police a decade earlier, that she'd take these stories to police, hoping actual investigators might be able to act.

She did so this past June.

But despite the similarities she saw and the severity of the alleged crimes, she would leave the station disappointed that day.

The woman who gathered the stories, P.E.I. musician Kinley Dowling, carries the burden of wondering how a community so small has hidden such damaging secrets for more than a decade — and she has spent months wondering whether the perpetrators are people she knows.

"It really kind of turned my world upside down, realizing that in this beautiful community [where] we live, that horrible things like this can happen," Dowling said.

In Charlottetown, in the early 2010s, parties were often big and wild. It was not unusual to see someone passed out at a house party or outside a bar. The average party-goer might not have imagined the person could have been drugged.

That may have been the case for anyone who passed by Complainant #5. She recalls having only four drinks at an Indie Pop Night event at Baba's Lounge in Charlottetown in 2011, when she felt herself losing control of her legs and realized she needed to leave. She managed to get herself out of the bar and hid in an adjacent empty lot, drifting in and out of consciousness, before calling a taxi when the sun came up.

And who knows what two patrolling officers thought when they came across a woman in a field, in the middle of the night, screaming for help in the fall of 2010? She had attended a Finger Eleven concert at the UPEI campus bar earlier that evening. She remembers seeing the band, but doesn't know how she got to the field a kilometre away, in the opposite direction of her home.