TOPEKA — In the mid ’90s, Paula Mitchell was celebrating a college basketball win at a party hosted by one of the players.
As the designated driver for her friends, she was sticking to Dr. Pepper, but she started to feel sick after she was given another soda by a basketball player.
“I get halfway through that can and I start feeling funny,” Mitchell said. “I started getting dizzy, almost like I had been drinking.”
She was taken to a back bedroom to rest. When Mitchell awoke, she was being raped by four basketball players. Her Dr. Pepper had been laced with the date rape drug.
“I could not scream. I could not fight them off,” Mitchell said. “I was paralyzed by that drug.”
Mitchell, now a mother and an advocate for sexual assault victims, said there’s still an need for protections against the date rape drug. She said her own daughter recently was in danger.
Two weeks ago, Mitchell took her daughter and friends out to celebrate her 21st birthday at a Derby club. When her group moved away from the table, Mitchell saw a man drop something into their unguarded drinks. She alerted the bouncers, who called the cops. All of the drinks at the table tested positive for the date rape drug.
“If I didn’t see that, all those girls could’ve been in the same spot I was,” Mitchell said, breaking down during a Wednesday House Health and Human Services Committee hearing.
She urged lawmakers to advance a proposal to legalize testing strips for the date rape drug.
“If we had those strips, where we could test them ourselves, we wouldn’t be in this situation,” Mitchell said.
Under current state law, testing strips for gamma hydroxybutyric acid, known informally as the date rape drug, are classified as drug paraphernalia. House Bill 2390 would legalize testing strips for fentanyl, ketamine and gamma hydroxybutyric acid.
The bill also would establish a Kansas overdose fatality review board to prevent and mitigate drug overdoses in the state.
Other women testified in support of the bill. Mothers Libby Davis and Brandy Harris both lost sons to fentanyl overdoses, a growing problem in the state.
“I am here as a mother, a mother that has had the worst thing imaginable taken from her, a child that I created,” Harris said. “My chance to be a grandmother someday.”
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine. Legal fentanyl is prescribed for pain relief. Illegal fentanyl is commonly mixed with other drugs as an inexpensive way of creating a more powerful high.
