CONTENT WARNING: This article discusses issues relating to spiking, as well as themes of grief.
Minutes before going live on air in a London TV studio, Colin Mackie was being shown how to hold a bottle of water. The bottle was sponsored, producers told him, and he needed to angle the label towards the swivelling camera. He glanced around the room, before pausing.
“I was sitting in the studio and I just thought, this is what Greg was going to be doing,” he says, “There are certain times when it just hits you.”
Greg, Colin’s son, was 18 when he died in November 2017, six weeks after moving into student halls to study film and TV at Edinburgh College. Colin, who now runs the charity Spike Aware UK with his wife Mandy, was in the studio to talk about the troubling rise of spiking-related deaths across university campuses.
Toxicology reports found the equivalent of five ecstasy tablets in Greg’s system, and his family believes the drug was slipped into his soft drink at a gathering in the halls. Greg was found dead in a nearby bathroom later that night. At 6:10 a.m. the next morning, two uniformed police officers knocked on the family’s door.
“Basically, we were told, ‘Your son’s died.’ That was that, in a nutshell,” Colin recalls. The officers, he says, knew few details and left without assigning a family liaison officer. At the time, police told Greg’s family that they deemed his death non-suspicious.
Nearly nine years on, no one has been prosecuted in relation to Greg’s death, but the family’s search for answers has escalated into a campaign to make drink spiking a standalone criminal offence in Scotland. While in England and Wales The Crime and Policing Act 2026 made drink spiking a standalone offence, in Scotland, prosecutors rely on broader charges such as assault or reckless conduct. Advocates for the change argue it would force police to take instances of spiking more seriously, standardise how cases are investigated, and help deliver justice for victims like Greg.
Recent figures show reported drugging offences in Scotland increased by 55 per cent to 154 last year, according to Police Scotland data. But campaigners emphasize it is likely that only a fraction of spiking offences are reported to authorities. Publicly available Police Scotland data obtained via FOI requests show that only one in seven reported cases results in a detention for the perpetrator.
“It’s frustrating to be a Scottish charity and watch the law come in for England and Wales before we can get it in our own country,” Colin says. A standalone offence, he argues, would give victims the confidence to report and give police a clear framework that avoids ambiguity about intent. Colin believes it would also challenge the culture of “prank spiking,” where people drug drinks for amusement without grasping the risks.
“Once people realise that putting a tablet in somebody’s drink can give them a criminal record that affects university, employment, and travel, it makes the act socially unacceptable,” he says.
When the Mackies began campaigning, coverage focused almost exclusively on female students in nightclubs. “But Greg was a teenage boy in a hall of residence, drinking a soft drink,” Colin says. As the family came across further cases, he adds, they found glaring inequalities in how spiking was investigated.
Neil Gray, the Cabinet Secretary for Justice, has repeatedly promised to meet the family, Colin says, but no date has been set, coming with great frustration for Colin. Police Scotland did not respond to The Student’s requests for comment regarding the investigation.
“There are times I think, why am I doing this?” Colin reflects, before answering his own question: “It’s for Greg and it’s for youngsters. We talk about him every day.”
The week Colin spoke to The Student, Greg would have turned 27. “You start thinking around those times of year: what would he be doing? Would he be married? Would we be grandparents? We’ll always wonder that.”
He pauses.
“The thing about Greg is that he’s always 18: he’s never going to age.”
Photo provided by Colin Mackie to The Student for press use.
