A lot has been said about the recent Double X column by Lucinda Rosenfeld on friendship, loyalty, and date-rape drugs. Like many of the site's commenters, I'm livid about the column and not at all mollified by Lucinda's halfhearted apology to readers. I'll get to why, specifically, in a minute. But first, a story:

The night before New Year's Eve, 2005, I went to an upscale Manhattan bar with my two best friends. We all had a round of gimlets, heavy on the lime juice. Enjoying ourselves but hardly tipsy, two of us started a second round. What happened a few sips into that drink, the two of us don't remember, but our friend who abstained tells us that within minutes, both of us went into slurred, babbling hysterics. One of us lunged across the bar and grabbed the bartender; the other threw up and slumped, barely conscious, on the floor. The club's bouncer, assuming we just couldn't handle what little liquor we'd been given, kicked us out. Our sober friend, who knew something else was wrong, shepherded us home to her Brooklyn apartment. I woke up a few hours later remembering nothing and feeling fine, as if whatever was in my body had suddenly worn off. There was no physical hangover, but there was one hell of an emotional one. My friends and I could only conclude that the second round of drinks had been drugged.

I don't often think about that incident. It was years ago, and nothing more horrifying came of it; we made it to safety. But the Double X column has brought it to the front of my mind. I usually like Rosenfeld's column, which is refreshingly tart, and I also like the site, for which I've written). But Rosenfeld's latest piece goes well beyond tart into sour.

It begins with a story far more awful than mine. A woman writes that on a recent night, she visited a club with friends, went to the bathroom, and never came back. Her friends left the club without bothering to track her down, and a policeman found her passed out on the sidewalk, alone. She woke up in the ER with no memory of what had happened. Her friends refused to come see her that night in the hospital and grudgingly drove her away the next morning—only as far as her abandoned car.

You can read Rosenfeld's reply to this tale for yourself, but here's a short (and admittedly exaggerated, but not much) paraphrase of it:

1. Your friends did nothing wrong. There's no reason they should have visited you in the ER; after all, they were comfortably "tucked in their beddy-bies." Midnight ER visits are the sort of thing that only husbands (or maybe boyfriends) should have to do.

2. "Only nuns make it out of youth without a few ambulance rides." So what happened to you really wasn't that bad. We've all been there!

3. Women sometimes say they've been slipped a date-rape drug "as a cover for irresponsible behavior." So your friends probably think that you were just drunk and that you're lying about the drugs. And, hey, maybe you are: "Only you know the truth."

There are plenty of ways to take apart this stupendously wrongheaded response. You can question, as Jezebel does, the first premise—the idea that a woman who lands in the ER in the middle of the night doesn't deserve a sympathetic visitor unless it's her husband, who's the only one obligated to drag himself out of bed. (If the woman doesn't have a husband, tough luck, I guess.) You can ask why Rosenfeld doesn't scold the woman's friends for abandoning her at the club without so much as a text message inquiring as to her whereabouts. You can question whether it's a good thing, or even true, that almost all kids have "a few ambulance rides" on the way to adulthood.

But these all seem like peripheral problems to me. It's that bit about how "only you know the truth" that's making me so angry.

Lately it's become fashionable to say that almost all women who claim they've been drugged are actually lying to cover up their drunkenness—that "you get sympathy if you say, 'My drink was spiked' [but ] you don't get sympathy if you say, 'We spent too long in the bar'." It sounds like this is what Rosenfeld is implying: sure, maybe you were drugged, or maybe you're just looking for an excuse for your "irresponsible behavior." Certainly, a few of her commenters have said as much, particularly the one who categorizes all women who think they've been drugged as "idiot girls who got so drunk off their a--es they eventually passed out ... There is no way we're getting anything close to the real story of what happened in this little 'poor me' vignette." And Rosenfeld herself says in her apology that she "suspected that [she] wasn't getting the full story."

Let's put aside for a minute the ludicrous idea that a woman would lie to an anonymous advice column (what incentive could she possibly have?) and examine the larger idea that lots of women lie about being drugged because they're ashamed of being drunk.

It's true that some women lie about how much they've had to drink—whether or not they invoke a date-rape drug as a cover. (In fact, I'm pretty sure everyone who drank as a teenager has lied about alcohol consumption at some point: "Really, Mom, it was only a sip!") It's also true that many women who think they were drugged don't have discernible levels of so-called date-rape drugs in their blood (possibly because the drugs aren't there to begin with, or possibly because they clear quickly from the bloodstream and are gone by the time a tox screen can be done). And finally, it's true that there are no solid statistics on how many women are drugged in bars and at parties every year. This MIT News article  claims there are 5,000 incidents a year with Rohypnol alone, but it doesn't give a source.

But none of this means that a given woman who says she's been drugged, like the one in Rosenfeld's column, is lying. None of it means that women are never drugged, any more than the murkiness of sexual-assault statistics and the occasional false accusation means that women are never raped. And yes, rape does need to be mentioned here—because we don't know what happened to the woman in Rosenfeld's column before the policeman found her on the pavement.

Reportedly, some other Double X staffers are preparing a follow-up post to the initial column. I’ll be watching the site closely for it to post, and when it does, I hope it acknowledges this simple truth: the proper response to a woman who thinks she's been drugged, then left passed out on the sidewalk, then abandoned again by friends who can't be bothered to visit her in the hospital is not "Suck it up, if you're even telling the truth." It's "I'm so sorry." It's "You should get some better BFFs." And maybe it's "Watch your drink—and your drinking—more carefully next time."

I'm sure Rosenfeld would have said all these things if the woman in her column had been a personal friend. But the actual woman who wrote to her deserves that kind of courtesy, too. So do all of us.

Carmichael is a senior writer for NEWSWEEK.