How do I stay safe on a night out?

Three habits decided at home, so that none of them needs a decision at the bar.

Never leave the drink unattended. Finish your drink before the restroom carries one small habit and the upgrade that came with it. The habit: finish your drink before you head to the restroom, because an unattended glass is the one easy opening a would-be spiker needs. The upgrade, which the page keeps attached because it is the truer version: better than finishing it every time is never leaving it unattended at all, a three-state rule, in your hand, with a friend you trust, or finished. The same person added the honest disclaimer that no habit makes the risk zero; it makes it harder, which is what safety habits are for. The page refuses the scary-story register on purpose: spiking is a real risk that is rare on any given night and cheap to defend against, so decide the rule once, reading this, and after that it runs like a seatbelt. It scales socially, offering to watch a friend’s drink and handing yours over when you step away. And the flip side: if someone’s night suddenly goes wrong, confusion, heaviness, dizziness out of proportion to what they drank, believe the signal, stay with them, and get help.

Put the water between the drinks. The water goes between the drinks refines the advice everyone owns. Interleaved water maintains hydration while the night is happening and mechanically slows the drinking, which the science-minded accounts there suspect is half of why it works. Order the water with the drink, not as a virtuous afterthought; eat a real meal before the first glass; skip the late shots, which are still being absorbed while you sleep; and before bed, salts rather than volume, because chugging a litre mostly buys distension and a 3am awakening. The most dangerous corner of that subject: paracetamol and alcohol go through the same liver, and taking it for a hangover or before bed is the one move those accounts treat as a hard no. The page renders the argument about what a hangover even is with both sides, and its decider is dose: past a real amount of alcohol nothing you drink afterwards buys the morning back, and the only guaranteed preventive is fewer drinks.

Download the map while you still have signal. Download the map while you still have signal is about getting home. Your phone can find its own position under an open sky with no signal, but it can only draw the streets if you gave it the picture first, so download the area on home wifi before you go and save the places you will need. Its safety line has two parts that belong to a night out: tell one trusted person the route and when you expect to be back, one trusted person rather than a public message, because broadcasting where you will be alone is its own risk; and the numbers, 999 in the UK, 911 in the US, 112 across the European Union, with a US 911 call worth trying even with no bars from your own network, because carriers must carry those calls from any phone.

Who this is not for. The water page says it: if the reason you are reading this is that the mornings are piling up, if the real subject is the drinking rather than the hangover, that question has its own gentler pages and answering it honestly is worth more than any electrolyte. And the drink page’s line about a friend whose night goes wrong is not a wait-and-see: stay with them and get help.