The best way to educate is to entertain. No one likes being lectured to, but if you wrap an important message in an entertaining package the audience won’t feel like they’ve been preached to and so will internalize it better.
For instance, someone yelling at the people of TikTok to protect their drinks from getting spiked? That’s hardly going to make an impact, as folks will scroll past it in seconds. But sharing a video in which you prank your friends at a party, thereby showing users just how easy it is to tamper with someone’s drink? That might just do the trick.
TikTok user Shirah got her warning across to the people of the app in an engagingly funny and upbeat way when she shared the shocking results of a prank she played during a house party she attended with her pals. “Spiking my friends’ drinks with candy to show them how easy it is to be tampered with,” Shirah wrote in her caption. Sure enough, the results of her experiment were presumably delicious, but nonetheless disturbing.
Armed with a cache of Pixy Stix, Shirah’s video includes various clips of her going around the party, smiling and blending in with the crowd to look innocuous, but what she’s really doing is targeting her friends and slipping some of the candy mix into their cups. It’s genuinely alarming how none of them even give her a second glance as she carefully, and sometimes brazenly, empties the Pixy Stix into their drinks.
While doing her best impression of a creep, Shirah fiendishly chose the perfect moment to dose her friends’ drinks, whether that be when they were turned away from their cups as they talked to someone or when they were digging around in their purse. She even managed to nab her brother, who was celebrating his 27th birthday at this party, as he grabbed his winnings from a piñata. Eventually, Shirah is so successful that she runs out of Pixy Stix and ends up throwing even more noticeable gummies into people’s drinks, but her friends are still none the wiser.
Shirah’s spiking session looks to have done the trick, as many in the comments have now learned their lesson. “This is horrifying! Will be covering my drinks from here on out,” one wrote. Another admitted, “This is an insanely important visual. I’d never expect it to happen to me but this shows that I’m not careful in the slightest.” Others shared their tips for how they stay safe: “I get beer bottles and ke[e]p my thumb over the top at all times.”
Drink spiking is definitely a problem that is only growing year after year. In 2022, a UK poll found that up to 15% of women had been spiked with alcohol or drugs in the past — that might not sound like much, but to put it another way, that’s more than 1 out of every 10. Think about how many people attend your average house party or nightclub. Suddenly, it makes sense why experts are labeling it an “epidemic”-level situation. Keep spreading the good word, Shirah… Although maybe go easy on spreading the candy.