A Cocktail Napkin Could Soon Detect Drugs in Your Drink
It’s Friday night and you’re at your favorite dive bar, standing alone. Someone hands you a vodka tonic. Before taking a sip, you pause. Is this safe?
You reach for a napkin, and tilt your glass to drip a little out. The napkin changes colors: Your cocktail has been drugged. You put it down, notify the bartender, and leave. You just narrowly avoided being a victim of drink spiking, and possibly assault.
That’s the potentially life-saving scenario college student Danya Sherman is trying to create with KnoNap, a drug-detecting cocktail napkin currently under development. The idea is that putting this capability into something so commonplace in bar culture will make checking drinks for known date-rape drugs as easy as wiping a drip off your hand.
“It’s a huge issue on college campuses that’s really under-addressed,” Sherman, the company’s founder and CEO, tells Glamour. “That’s what we’re working on with KnoNap, to make sure there’s a conversation.”
Sherman’s activism follows a well-established trend of college students taking the lead on addressing the issue of sexual assault. And there’s good reason for their leadership: Women in college are more likely to experience sexual violence than the overall female population. Many graduate with at least one story of someone they know being the victim of a suspected drugging. A 2016 study published in the American Psychological Association’s Psychology of Violence journal found that one in 13 college students believe they have been given a spiked drink; 14 percent of those reported a sexual encounter as a result.
For Sherman, a junior at George Washington University, the issue is personal. In 2016, while studying abroad in Spain, she says she was assaulted by an acquaintance who she believes drugged her drink. When she got back to campus, she was surprised to find several friends she confided in share similar stories.
“I knew I needed to do something,” Sherman recalled. “I looked into products that I could use to increase safety, [and] there was nothing on the market that I would personally use.” Drug-detecting coasters available for sale were too bulky and carried obvious branding that could make it too hard to check a drink discreetly. A proposed color-changing polish seemed impractical — who wants to keep their nails painted with the same thing all the time and then have to dip their finger in their drink? Plus, it limits protection to people who would wear nail polish at all, when anyone can be the victim of drug-assisted date rape.
The next spring, Sherman enrolled in a women’s entrepreneurship course, which culminated in a campuswide business-proposal contest. Sherman entered, winning more than $10,000 in seed money and the chance to work with a development firm to make her KnoNap concept a reality.
Support for the idea expanded from there. Following the campus award, Sherman won a national entrepreneurship competition and started working with a local incubator for startups. On Wednesday night, she was honored as a Toyota Mother of Invention at a Women in the World salon in Washington, D.C. That award came with a $50,000 grant to grow her business even more. She plans to launch a Kickstarter to help fund the first round of manufacturing in April. The goal, she says, is to roll out the product by the end of the year.
KnoNap isn’t the first or only attempt to curb date rape with supplies commonly found in the party aisle. In addition to the coasters, a group of teens made headlines last year with a plan to create drug-detecting straws. But Sherman believes hers is the most discreet and easy-to-adopt of the prototypes. She plans to partner with universities to distribute the napkins to dorms and Greek organizations, and market them in bulk to popular bars and venues, in addition to selling them directly to consumers online.
What remains to be seen is if any such invention can actually curb assault. In the past, some anti-rape activists have expressed concerns that this type of product puts too much of the burden and responsibility for preventing assault on potential victims. Research suggests that nearly two-thirds of spiking cases among college students occur in an apartment, dorm room, or fraternity, which is to say not in bars or local businesses that might distribute precautionary products. And given that experts estimate a majority of rapes in college are committed by an acquaintance, students would need to use the napkins consistently—and even among people they might otherwise trust.
But experts also say educating and empowering students is a worthy first step. “These products [do] not necessarily curb sexual assaults but more so put the power back into the ladies’ hands,” JoAnn Buttaro, a date-rape survivor and national victims’ advocate, tells Glamour. “If they have something like this on hand, they can feel more comfortable enjoying a night out with friends or safer when meeting a date for the first time.” This gets to the heart of Sherman’s mission, though she stresses gender-inclusivity is a part of it too: “This is an issue that can affect anyone. To create lasting, sustainable social change, everyone needs to buy in—regardless of gender.”
For Sherman, sharing that knowledge and power is part of the point. “You cannot protect yourself against an issue with which you’re not familiar,” she says. And once KnoNap hits the market, she hopes we can all get a lot more familiar with what’s going into our drinks.
