Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2010

Colloquially, "Rohypnol" is used to refer to all benzodiazepines when
used as date-rape drugs, though properly it's a trade name for a
particular benzo.

GHB is definitely "usually used by choice", too, and has been at least
since the 1970s--for a while in the late 1990s/early 2000s it was
quite a popular club drug in the US, though its use seems to have
declined somewhat in recent years.  It's sometimes called liquid
ecstasy (or liquid E or liquid X, following the same geographic
distribution as the abbreviations E and X for ecstasy do).  It's
fairly dangerous stuff.

"Roofies" normally means just Rohypnol (in the generic sense mentioned
above), but I've occasionally heard it used to refer to date-rape
drugs generally.  This more generic usage isn't ubiquitous,
either--"do you know whether they slipped you roofies or liquid E?"
would be a perfectly ordinary question.

When used in this even broader sense, it almost always carries the
involuntary or date-rape connotation; if someone had been slipped GHB
they might colloquially say "someone slipped me a roofie last week",
but it would be bizarre to hear someone say "I took roofies last
night" when they'd been intentionally taking GHB to get loaded.