I ran into a friend of a friend on a treadmill next to me at the gym over the weekend. We talked for a few minutes before she mentioned that she needed to tell me something. She said she read a column I wrote a few months ago looking into rumors that women were being drugged at downtown bars. She said she thought it had happened to her.

It happened a year ago or so, she told me. She was at a function for a professional group after work. There were appetizers and she had a glass of wine. She finished her glass and then sat at the bar. The bartender offered her a second glass on the house. About halfway through it, she said, she started feeling really intoxicated.

She finished the glass, but felt so strange she decided to walk home. It was just after 7 p.m. At home, she said, she decided to eat something, thinking maybe it would absorb the alcohol. Then she went to bed "pretty much passed out" at around 8 p.m.

The next morning she woke up groggy, and found her kitchen in disarray.

"I thought I was eating the night before," she told me. "But I don't think any of the food made it to my mouth."

Here's the weird part: Just about the time she got to the end of the story, the woman on the treadmill on the other side of me interrupted.

"I couldn't help overhearing," she said. "That same thing just happened to my friend, at the same bar, two weeks ago."

Ever since I first wrote about the bar-drug issue a few months ago, stories like this have been coming my way. At the gym, on the street, at the grocery store -- women and a few men have been telling me they suspect they are being drugged while out at bars. It seems the issue isn't going away.

I checked in with police again to see if they were investigating crimes related to women being drugged at bars, but they told me they didn't have anything new.

When I wrote my last column, the person I talked to at Standing Together Against Rape, or STAR, said she didn't have any specific information about an increased number of women being drugged at bars. When I called earlier this week, I talked to Keeley Olson, a program director. She supervises victim advocates who respond to sexual assault reports. She said stories about being drugged had been coming in more often.

"Probably over the last four to six months we've heard quite a few of those reports," she said.

"A number of these people have no knowledge about what happened to them and they are asking 'Was I raped, can you tell me definitively?' "

She said she had heard about bars downtown and in Midtown, about women waking up in strange houses or hotels without knowing where they were. Frequently alcohol was involved, she said, but that didn't mean drugs weren't involved as well. Usually there was a suspected sex assault. Some women were robbed.

It seemed less likely the drugs were the classic "date-rape drugs" like Rohypnol or GHB, she said, and more likely they were more commonly available drugs, like the sleeping pill Ambien, or even Benadryl.

Proving that someone has been drugged is very difficult unless doctors have the first urine sample after the drug has been ingested, she said. Usually people are so intoxicated, they don't make it to the emergency room. Finding proof of sexual assault can be just as hard if the woman has no memory of it and the assailant uses a condom, she said. If a woman is incapacitated by drugs, she's less likely to have physical signs of rape, like bruises. Investigators can take DNA samples, but the crime lab is backed up so getting information on crimes without suspects can take a very long time.

"Do we have people out there that know the hoops to jump through to avoid detection?" she said. "It kind of begs the question, do we have serial rapists out there that we're not catching?"

Her advice: When women go out, stay away from mixed drinks, unless they are in containers with lids, or go with beer in bottles or cans. They should ask to open it themselves or watch it be opened. Next month STAR will be canvassing bars with safety information, she said. It's hard to prove women are being drugged, but with the anecdotes and reports she'd heard, she was convinced something was going on.

"It happens, it's not uncommon, watch your drinks," she said.