The Miami Poison Unit has 100 recorded cases of rape where Rohypnol was used. But we have no evidence of any similar misuse of the drug in London."The woman said she was bought a drink by a man with a Scottish accent. She told police the last thing she remembered before waking up at home was that she felt faint half an hour after taking the drink.Mr Macauley said: "It would [be] very hard to prove any case of the drug being used. It goes through the system extremely quickly so by the time any toxicology tests could be done it's unlikely there would be any traces in the bloodstream."Scotland Against Drugs, a part-government, part-private industry-funded organisation, is seeking to raise awareness among young people of the dangers presented by Rohypnol and another commonly abused anaesthetic, Kitamine, which was identified as a "date-rape" pill in the US in 1979.Women looking to buy ecstasy in Scottish night-clubs and pubs have been deliberately sold Kitamine instead, said Dr Macauley.Rohypnol is available on prescription in 64 countries but is banned in the United States where it has gained widespread notoriety as a the "date-rape pill".So well-known are its properties that it featured in an episode of the hit hospital series ER, screened in the UK last week, in which a nurse was raped after she was given the drug unwittingly.Florida has been the centre of the US battle over the drug, where a "roofie", as a tablet of Rohypnol is called, costs as little as $1.50. When she wakes up she knows little or nothing about it."Last week, a report by a woman that her drink was spiked with an unknown substance in Soho, central London, prompted Scotland Yard to issue a warning to women to beware of the possibility that strangers may try to spike their drinks.A spokeswoman for the Metropolitan Police said: "We are aware of reports of Rohypnol's use in the United States.

Rohypnol is here," said David Macauley of the Glasgow-based campaign group Scotland Against Drugs."If you had to compose the requirements for a date-rape drug then Rohypnol is as close as you can get," he said."It can work within 20 minutes... The drug, Rohypnol, is available on private prescription in the UK for back pain and insomnia and is also used as a pre-surgery anaesthetic. It is 10 times more powerful than Valium. But if the drug is taken unsupervised, particularly in combination with social drugs or alcohol, it has the more sinister effect of making the victim vulnerable to rape."I have had reports of it being misused in this country and used as a date-rape drug There have been police seizures of it in Scotland. "But I cannot see how it is in the public interest for footage like this to be seen.". "It would obviously need to be balanced by a public interest defence," he says. "In any case, I felt reassured that having asked the cameraman who he was and realised they were a commercial rather than a police crew, the police had told me the film wouldn't be used."She was also concerned that the man who mugged her, who had her address from her handbag, might see the footage and return.

She feels the onus should have been on the TV company to contact her for her permission rather than for her to have to track down the television company and ask them not to show it. "In a society where there are no longer many ways to participate, programmes like this can make them feel part of something." Yvonne's 50 seconds of fame appeared in a 15-minute "special operations" section of Crime Month, made by LWT, which follows different police departments carrying out their duties.A spokeswoman for LWT said their film crew and reporter had identified themselves to Yvonne. "Following strict guidelines, our reporter made himself known to her and explained he was from LWT," she says. "At no stage did she ask [the crew] to leave and, in fact, invited everyone in to her flat. "People we have interviewed say they like them because they may be able to help the police and play a role," she says.

The security camera that filmed him saved his life because police officers came to his rescue, but he ended up reliving the lowest point of his life on ITV, BBC and in the local press.Dr Sonia Livingstone, a lecturer in social anthropology at the London School of Economics who is researching the representation of crime in the press, television and film, says programmes like Crime Month are attractive to audiences because they are participatory. "They may have been trespassing, but she probably implied consent because she thought they were a police crew." As the public thirst for real-life police action continues to spawn fly-on-the-wall footage from ambulance- chasing film crews, closed circuit TV and police cameras, Liberty is concerned at an increasing number of complaints from people who have had similar experiences to Yvonne's. How did they have the right to film me at my own home and then use it against my will?"Philip Leach, the legal adviser at the civil liberties pressure group Liberty, says the camera crew were perfectly within their rights. When she rang 999, a camera crew came too. Yvonne, a freelance editor from west London, says the LWT cameraman, who she initially thought was a policeman videotaping her evidence, failed to identify himself to her and the police later promised her the footage would end up on the cutting room floor.She says she didn't think anything more of it, but when she went to get new keys cut for her flat three weeks later the key-cutter instantly recognised her from the television "Sorry to hear about your break-in," he said. She knows this because she has played the scene and the minutes leading up to it - when a large man held a knife to her throat and then moved it downwards to cut her handbag from her arm - over and over in her mind since the attack. Other people, friends and strangers, also know she was in shock because they saw her white face and the police breaking into her flat, SAS-style, on prime time television.