Veering slightly away from the original thrust of the topic, but along the same lines...
Back in my university days I participated in a number of engineering student pub crawls. Being engineering, the course was essentially a sausage fest, so you had to do what you had to do to keep entertained...of course, if we could manage to organise said pub crawl on the night that the girls studying nursing were organising an event out on the town, then that was a win. One of our lecturers even offered on a number of occasions to drive the mini-bus to take us from pub to pub (what a champ)! Although by about the third pub, he'd caved in and started drinking himself, and the bus was abandoned to be collected the next day...one time with a parking ticket attached...
Anyway, on one of these occasions I'd been a bit crook the week before, and managed to pick up a stomach bug that had laid me up for a few days. I was just getting clear of the anti-biotics though, so I thought what the hell, lets go for it.
About three pubs in, I was feeling off. Not good drunk, just off. I went to the toilets and vomited up my guts. After that, I felt good enough to continue on, but still not right. By the fifth pub, the crawl had started to split up, people went their separate ways, some of us went off to the clubs (hunting nursing students), and I was at a place on the intoxication chart that I'd never visited before. The combination of the anti-biotics and beer had made everything in my body just feel like static. I knew I was doing things, but it really wasn't registering with me. It's very hard to explain.
Anyway, one of my mates and I headed off from the clubs back to one of the pubs. We had another pint there, then wandered back out into the street in search of some of our other classmates. About 50m from the pub we were approached from behind by a group of about 4 guys. One of them said something to my mate, and then two of them started beating the absolute shit out of him.
I was paralyzed by my heightened intoxicated state. I could not move. I felt like a sack of swollen beer, anchored to the ground. I finally managed to stagger towards what was going on in some ham-fisted attempt to intervene, but the other two guys grabbed me by the arms and dragged me back. Curiously, they didn't start laying in to me. I had that awful helpless feeling that they were going to kill him, and I couldn't do anything. I wanted to scream out, but I was that blotto that i couldn't yell out anything that was comprehensible.
After what seemed like an eternity, the 4 guys upped and ran off. About 30 seconds later, a cop car pulled up. My mate was pretty badly beaten around the face, and they got him off to hospital (thankfully just a broken nose, black eyes, and bad bruising around the chest and stomach). The cops questioned me about what happened, but in my state they may as well have asked me to explain quantum mechanics using Plasticine - I couldn't offer them anything useful. The guys had probably nicked off into another pub and were going to be difficult to track down.
I don't think they ever caught the guys who did it, and my mate never really gave me a full story as to why he thought it happened. I'm sure there was more to it than a random attack, but i didn't push the issue with him.
Anti-biotics and pub crawls don't mix, even if there are sexy student nurses at stake.
