Read Online Trophy Widow by Michael A. Kahn - Free Book Online Page B

were far more likely to use a drug’s brand name. Who knew, or could remember, that the dentist numbed you with a shot of procaine hydrochloride, or that the generic name for the twenty-one Ortho-Novums I took each month was norethindrone/mestranol? After all, even Angela’s physician had used brand names during his police interview. He told them he had prescribed Nembutal and Valium, not pentobarbital sodium and diazepam.
    So I backspaced over flunitrazepam and typed in Rohypnol . Then I hit the transmit key and leaned back to wait. After fifteen seconds the screen flashed a message:
    Search interrupted—your current search request has located more than 1,000 documents. Would you care to modify your search request? Yes/No?:
I frowned in surprise. There were more than a thousand newspaper and magazine articles in which the word Rohypnol appeared?
    I typed in yes and then modified the search to eliminate all articles shorter than one thousand words. It took two more search modifications to get the number under one hundred articles.
    By then I was very curious. I pressed the key to view the first document. A moment later, the screen filled with the opening paragraphs of an article that had appeared three years ago in the financial section of the Washington Post under the headline:
    COUNTERING ILL EFFECTS OF AN ABUSED DRUG;
FIRM RAISES AWARENESS IN SEX-RELATED ATTACKS
    I leaned forward and started reading.
    The pill is small, white and tasteless when dissolved in liquid. It is manufactured by Swiss pharmaceutical giant Hoffman-La Roche Ltd. for treating severe insomnia.The prescription sleeping aid is sold and marketed in 80 countries around the world, including many in Europe and Asia, and is a strong revenue producer for the company, though the drug manufacturer has never sought approval to sell it in the United States.Yet it is in this country where the pharmaceutical, known as Rohypnol, has been branded a “date rape drug” by police and has engendered calls for stricter penalties for those who possess it.Rohypnol has been called the date rape drug because of a rise in sexual assaults that police suspect have been committed after the illegally imported drug was slipped into a victim’s drink. The drug so incapacitates those who ingest it that they cannot resist sexual assault and they often don’t remember much of the attack later, police say.
    I reread the last paragraph.
    Now, of course, I knew why the word Rohypnol sounded familiar. The date rape drug.
    I leaned forward and read on.
    The article focused on the struggle between those fighting to maintain the status quo and those seeking to get the drug reclassified from Schedule 4 to Schedule 1 on the Drug Enforcement Administration’s controlled substances list. Schedule 1 drugs include crack cocaine and heroin. According to the article, the legislative compromise had been to stiffen the criminal penalties for the use of any controlled substance in a sexual assault. But the director of the D.C. Rape Crisis Center discounted the value of that approach.
    â€œA drug like Rohypnol can cause amnesia,” she explained. “That means that women will not be able to provide the information the police need to prosecute a sexual assault case. You’ll never get to the point of using the enhanced penalties.”
    I paged slowly through the other articles. Rohypnol had started coming into the U.S. about three years before Michael Green’s death, much of it smuggled up through Mexico. It had a variety of street names, the most popular being “roofies.” Other street names included Roachies, Ropes, La Rocha, Rib Roche, R-2, and Mexican Valium.
    Rohypnol’s use in sexual assaults had earned it a creepier set of nicknames, including the Forget Pill, Trip-and-Fall, and Mind Erasers. In a case in Broward County, a convicted rapist boasted of using Rohypnol to rape more than twenty women. In Miami, where the drug comes in from Latin