Meeting new people — at a bar, a party, or through an app — is a normal and good part of life. A small set of habits lets you do it without treating every stranger as a threat, while still protecting yourself in the situations that do occasionally turn out badly.
Never leave a drink unattended
This applies everywhere, not just nightclubs — a restaurant, a house party, a work function. Drink-spiking can happen at any venue, and symptoms can appear within 15 to 30 minutes. If you step away from your drink, treat it as gone. Order a new one rather than assuming it's fine.
Worth knowing: never accept an open drink from someone you don't know well, and never leave your own unattended even briefly. Both are simple habits, and both close off the most common way spiking actually happens.
Meeting someone from an app or online platform
Always meet for the first time in a busy, well-lit public place — never somewhere private, and never somewhere the other person chose without you having a say. Tell a friend where you're going and roughly when you expect to be done. This isn't about distrust of the specific person; it's a baseline habit that costs nothing when the meeting goes fine, and matters a great deal when it doesn't.
Trust your gut over your manners
If a situation or a person feels wrong, leave — immediately, and without waiting to find a polite way to say it. Most people who later describe an unsafe encounter mention noticing something felt off well before anything happened, and staying anyway out of social discomfort. Prioritising your safety over politeness is never the wrong call.
Let someone else know where you are
Before a first meeting or a night out, tell someone in your findME safety circle, or start a Trace so they can see your location for the evening. It costs you nothing if the night goes well, and it means someone already knows where to start looking if it doesn't.