The Hospital Clínic of Barcelona functions as the reference centre for sexual assault care in its region and has developed a comprehensive care model for recent sexual violence. The centre reports between 400 and 500 sexual assaults annually, and substance use is involved in roughly one-third of those cases. Until now, however, detailed and current data on the victims, the circumstances of the assaults and the specific substances involved have been limited. Alcohol and cocaine had previously been described as the most frequently detected substances, but the research team sought to update and expand that picture using five years of clinical records.

The study’s demographic findings are striking in their consistency. Eighty-five percent of the DFSA cases assessed involved women, and 73 percent involved individuals aged between 18 and 35 years. This concentration in young adulthood, the authors note, has direct implications for how prevention messages and clinical screening protocols should be targeted. Rather than being confined to any single community, the affected population spans a broad swath of the city’s young adult residents and visitors, making general awareness campaigns and routine toxicological screening in emergency and forensic settings essential components of the response.

Perhaps the most consequential finding concerns location. Contrary to the popular image of drug-facilitated assaults as crimes committed in nightclubs and bars, the most frequently reported setting was the private home, accounting for 42 percent of cases, followed by public spaces at 23 percent. Nightlife settings, while significant, did not dominate the data. This distribution matters for prevention strategy: interventions focused solely on drink-spiking in bars may miss the majority of cases, which occur in residential environments where the dynamics of substance consumption and vulnerability may be quite different.

The toxicological profile of the cases reflects both persistent patterns and emerging trends. Alcohol was detected in 55 percent of cases and cocaine in 28 percent, confirming their status as the most prevalent substances. But newer and less commonly monitored drugs featured prominently as well. MDMA appeared in 23 percent of cases and GHB, a central nervous system depressant long associated with sedation-facilitated assault, in 15 percent. The researchers describe these emerging substances as increasing, a trend they argue demands closer monitoring because detection windows, clinical presentation and forensic interpretation differ substantially from those of alcohol and cocaine.

The COVID-19 pandemic introduced a natural experiment into the study period, and the data show that both the contexts of assault and the substances involved shifted during that time. Notably, cases in which drugs were supplied by the perpetrator rose, constituting 17 percent of DFSA cases by 2022. This distinction between voluntary consumption and perpetrator-supplied substances is central to the clinical and legal understanding of DFSA, and its increase over the study period represents one of the study’s most concerning signals.

Sex-specific patterns in substance detection added another layer of complexity. MDMA and cocaine were more prevalent among female victims, while methamphetamine and GHB were more prevalent among male victims. These differences suggest that prevention messaging, clinical suspicion and toxicological screening panels may need to be tailored rather than uniform, since the substances most likely to be involved vary with the victim’s sex and, as the multivariate analysis showed, with the setting in which the assault took place.

The multivariate analysis among female victims produced several statistically robust associations. Cases involving both alcohol and drugs were more frequently associated with public spaces than with nightlife settings, with an odds ratio of 3.75 (95 percent confidence interval 1.55 to 9.05). Cases involving drugs alone were less frequently observed among women aged 18 to 25 than among those aged 25 to 35, with an odds ratio of 0.55 (95 percent confidence interval 0.32 to 0.97), suggesting that drug-only involvement rises with age within this cohort. Meanwhile, assaults occurring in private homes were more frequently classified in the drug-only category compared with nightlife settings, with an odds ratio of 2.46 (95 percent confidence interval 1.14 to 5.45). Taken together, these associations paint a picture in which the combination of substances and the location of the assault are systematically linked rather than randomly distributed.

Methodologically, the study relied on univariate, bivariate and multivariate analyses of clinical records from the reference centre, allowing the researchers to describe victim characteristics and identify independent associations between substance categories, victim demographics and assault settings. The retrospective design means the findings capture patterns among victims who presented for care rather than the full incidence of DFSA in the community, a limitation common to studies of sexual violence. Even so, the size of the cohort and the five-year span give the results unusual weight for this field, where single-centre data are often fragmented or outdated.

The authors conclude that most DFSA cases involved women aged 18 to 35 and that residential settings were the most frequently reported locations, with alcohol and cocaine remaining the most commonly detected substances while newer substances showed distinct patterns according to assault setting and victim sex. Their central recommendation is the establishment of surveillance systems capable of continuously monitoring evolving patterns of substance use and assault contexts, so that prevention programmes and victim care protocols can adapt in near real time. As novel psychoactive substances circulate and consumption habits shift, the study suggests, static assumptions about drug-facilitated sexual assault quickly become obsolete, and only systematic, data-driven monitoring can keep clinical and preventive responses aligned with the reality on the ground.

Subject of Research: Epidemiology and toxicology of drug-facilitated sexual assault cases treated at a Barcelona referral centre from 2018 to 2022

Article Title: Unveiling dynamics of drug-facilitated sexual assault: an observational retrospective study in Barcelona (2018–2022)

Article References: Camps, A., Salgado, E., García-Esteve, L., Echevarría, T., & Bertran, M. J. (2026). Unveiling dynamics of drug-facilitated sexual assault: an observational retrospective study in Barcelona (2018–2022). BMC Public Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-026-29101-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12889-026-29101-6

Keywords: drug-facilitated sexual assault, DFSA, sexual violence, toxicology, alcohol, cocaine, GHB, MDMA, Barcelona, Hospital Clínic, public health, victim care

The study, published in Archives of Sexual Behavior, was conducted by a team including Lucia Gallego-Deike, Marcos Bella-Fernández, and Hilario Blasco-Fontecilla, working with data from the Spanish Observatory on Drugs and Addictions. The EWSD is a multinational, web-based survey coordinated every three years by the European Union Drugs Agency across 30 European and neighboring countries. Spain has participated since 2021, and the 2024 edition collected data between May and June. To qualify, participants had to be 18 or older and report having used at least one of several substances in the previous year, including cannabis, cocaine, ecstasy/MDMA, amphetamine, methamphetamine, heroin, or any new psychoactive substance. The questionnaire spanned 225 questions and took roughly fifteen minutes to complete.

The technical detail in the new paper is considerable. Respondents were classified by both sex assigned at birth and gender identity, allowing the researchers to distinguish cisgender men, cisgender women, and transgender or non-binary participants. A respondent was counted as using a drug if they had consumed it within the previous 12 months, and they were categorized as engaging in chemsex if they identified a chemsex party as a context of use for at least one substance in that period. Statistical comparisons between subgroups used t-tests for quantitative variables and chi-square tests for qualitative ones, with all analyses performed in R version 4.3.2.

The most striking findings concern why people use drugs at all. Cannabis and heroin stand apart from the general recreational pattern. Nearly half of cannabis users, 49.73 percent, said they used it to relax or manage stress, as did 30.14 percent of heroin users. About a quarter of users of each substance reported taking them to improve sleep, and 26.35 percent reported using them to cope with anxiety or depression. This self-medication profile contrasts sharply with substances such as ecstasy/MDMA, where 73 percent of users reported purely recreational motives. The researchers note that comparable proportions of cannabis and heroin users reported consumption driven by dependence, despite the two substances carrying very different social perceptions of risk.

Context matters as much as motive. Across the board, drugs were most often consumed at home, but music festivals and parties emerged as the most frequent public settings. This aligns with a well-established body of evidence: wastewater analyses in several countries have documented spikes in psychostimulant concentrations during festivals featuring rap, house, dance, pop, or rock music, and surveys of festival attendees have repeatedly identified MDMA and cannabis as the most common illicit drugs in those environments. Clubs and bars ranked slightly lower. Only cannabis and heroin appeared across an unusually wide range of environments, including schools, supervised drug use rooms, and natural settings.

The sexualized drug use findings carry the most public health weight. Sexualized drug use, or SDU, is an umbrella term for the intentional use of substances to enhance or facilitate sexual activity, practiced across genders and orientations but disproportionately represented among sexual-orientation and gender minorities. The paper emphasizes that no unified definition of SDU exists, and chemsex, its most specific subset, is likewise not recognized as a distinct diagnostic entity in the ICD-11. Chemsex conventionally involves stimulants, methamphetamine, GHB/GBL, and mephedrone, used before or during prolonged group sexual sessions, historically among men who have sex with men, often facilitated by geosocial networking apps and hosted in private residences or sex-on-premise venues.

The new data show that among the 874 respondents reporting drug use for sexual enhancement, 81.46 percent used only one substance, while 12.93 percent used two or more, and use of five or more drugs was rare. Male respondents reported sexual enhancement use at roughly twice the rate of female respondents. Cisgender men reported higher rates of sexualized use of cocaine (crack), heroin, and MDMA than cisgender women, while transgender or non-binary participants reported higher MDMA use for sexual purposes than cisgender women. Cannabis was the most frequently used substance for sexual enhancement across all gender groups, a finding consistent with its overall status as the most widely used illicit drug.

Chemsex itself remained a minority practice but displayed a distinctive signature. Of the 206 respondents who attended at least one chemsex session in the past year, the vast majority, 170 or 81.33 percent, were cisgender men, followed by 22 cisgender women (10.53 percent) and 14 transgender or non-binary individuals (6.70 percent). Methamphetamine and new psychoactive substances were primarily linked to chemsex parties, and the route of administration differed markedly from general drug users: injection and rectal insertion were far more prevalent among chemsex attendees, as was smoking in pipes. Injection within chemsex contexts, sometimes called slamsex, is a particularly high-risk variant associated with elevated likelihood of addiction, psychosis, neurological harm, overdose, and sexually transmitted infections.

The sociodemographic profile of sex-related drug users also diverged from the rest of the sample in statistically significant ways. Sex assigned at birth and gender identity both differed between groups, with p-values of 0.004 and below 0.001 respectively, and sex-related drug users were slightly younger, more often students, and included a modestly higher proportion of transgender or non-binary individuals, 3.66 percent versus 2.38 percent. Employment status also differed significantly. Notably, living situation, income, residency, and education showed no significant differences, echoing review literature that has found inconsistent sociodemographic correlates of SDU beyond gender and age.

Perhaps the most consequential implication of the study is its suggestion that chemsex epidemiology is shifting. Though the practice is traditionally associated with men who have sex with men, the presence of women among chemsex participants in this sample suggests the phenomenon may be expanding into heterosexual populations, a trend supported by emerging but still limited research on heterosexual men and women in party and club subcultures. Chemsex carries substantial risks, including unsafe sexual practices that raise HIV and hepatitis C transmission, drug-induced disinhibition that can lead to non-consensual encounters, and long-term mental health problems such as depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, psychotic symptoms, and cognitive decline. The authors argue that prevention campaigns, which have until now focused primarily on MSM communities, must adapt. They call for targeted strategies including health education, harm reduction, inclusive care services, and professional training, measures they say are essential to reduce harm and improve health outcomes as the landscape of sexualized drug use evolves.

Subject of Research: Sexualized drug use and chemsex patterns among illicit drug users in Spain

Article Title: Patterns of Drug Use Across Social and Sexual Contexts in Spain: Insights From the European Web Survey on Drugs 2024

Article References: Gallego-Deike, L., Bella-Fernández, M., López-Sánchez, L. M., Brime-Beteta, B., Ruiz-Medina, S., & Blasco-Fontecilla, H. (2026). Patterns of Drug Use Across Social and Sexual Contexts in Spain: Insights From the European Web Survey on Drugs 2024. Archives of Sexual Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-026-03525-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10508-026-03525-y

Keywords: chemsex, sexualized drug use, European Web Survey on Drugs, methamphetamine, cannabis, MDMA, public health, men who have sex with men, harm reduction, Spain, new psychoactive substances, drug use patterns