I'm okay with these kinds of shrooms.

I don’t do shrooms. I don’t advocate for anyone to do shrooms. I know people who have done shrooms, but that’s about it.

I’m talking about mushrooms (aka “magic mushrooms”) containing psychoactive compounds, that people often ingest for recreational purposes.  And so, y’know, over the years as people have regaled me with their shroom-tripping experiences, it’s always something along the lines of “I thought all of the birds were going to attack me!” or “I saw mud people growing out of my living room carpet!”

A) This doesn’t sound fun to me in any way, and B) based on this, I’d assumed that shrooms make people’s brains way too overactive, for them to be experiencing things above and beyond reality.

But, new research says I was wrong about shrooms. Let’s discuss.

Trippy?

From what I previously understood, people would ingest mushrooms, and if they were in a negative state of mind, they’d have a “bad trip.” If they were with friends, with other people tripping, they were more likely to have a “good trip.” Aspects of these trips seemed to include lots of visual and auditory hallucinations: “halos” glowing around light sources, warping colors, maybe some synesthesia.

So I just figured that magic mushrooms must hyper-activate the parts of the brain that perceive color and sound, to the point where people perceive things that aren’t even there.

However, recent research out of the U.K. says that, surprisingly, I’ve got it all backwards. Scientists at the University of Bristol took 30 people and injected them directly with either a saltwater placebo or two milligrams of psilocybin, the psychoactive compound in shrooms. I want to make an aside here: the paper says that “All subjects had previous experience with a hallucinogenic drug but not within 6 wk of the study.” Okay cool, so here’s what I’m imagining:

Within a minute or two, the test subjects started to feel the effects of the psilocybin, and the researchers gave them fMRIs during their trips. Surprisingly to me, and to the scientists, brain activity and blood flow decreased by up to 20% during the influence of the drug, and these decreases were proportional to the reported intensity of the trip! The specific parts of the brain that experienced the suppressed activity and blood flow included the thalamus, the medial prefontal cortex, and the anterior cingulate cortex.

The thought behind this finding is that when people do shrooms, pathways in the brain that would normally restrict cognition are temporarily turned off, allowing people to cognate at higher levels than ever before. Some of these same cognition-restraining pathways are overactive in cases of depression, but I won’t go so far as to suggest shrooms as a treatment for depressive disorders!

In any case, I won’t discourage any research group from trying to find therapeutic value in naturally-occurring psychoactive drugs like psilocybin. In the U.K., at least, mushrooms even rank in as the least harmful drug by some measures:

The brain is already fascinating, and studies like this make it clear that there is a ton of work left to be done in the neuroscience field. The brain is constantly surprising us.

Stay nerdy!

Carhart-Harris RL, Erritzoe D, Williams T, Stone JM, Reed LJ, Colasanti A, Tyacke RJ, Leech R, Malizia AL, Murphy K, Hobden P, Evans J, Feilding A, Wise RG, & Nutt DJ (2012). Neural correlates of the psychedelic state as determined by fMRI studies with psilocybin. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 109 (6), 2138-43 PMID: 22308440

In any case, I recently found myself in a position of song lyric uncertainty that ended up being extremely enlightening. Last year, the song “Like A G6” by the group Far East Movement was a huge hit in clubs. Since my classmates and I love to dance (hey, grad school can be fun!), I ended up singing along with this song, like, all the time…especially since one could interpret a “G6″ to be a private jet or a sixth-year grad student with strong hopes of finishing her Ph.D. Anyway, when it came time for me to exuberantly proclaim that I was “Sippin’ sizzurp in my ride!” I would just sing along and give a self-deprecating laugh because, obviously, “sizzurp” couldn’t be a real word, but we were all just yelling and having fun, so what was a missed lyric here or there?

But (to make a long story short), I found out that sizzurp is real, kids. I wasn’t mistaken about those lyrics. Sizzurp is an actual concoction that people drink as a recreational drug to have a good time… but it’s surprisingly dangerous, so I’m going to do a quick breakdown of sizzurp aka “purple drank” in this post.

As for what it means when this song talks about “gettin’ slizzard,” that’s anybody’s best guess, so leave a comment if you think you know.

1. What is sizzurp? Chances are, you may have at some point ingested all of the components of sizzurp without knowing it, but you probably had them separately. The formula for sizzurp is quite simple, actually:

While the soda and candy combination sounds like an innocent flirtation with diabetes, the recreational use of prescription cough syrup is not innocent at all. Prescription cough medicine contains codeine and promethazine, an opiate and an antihistamine, respectively. Since cough syrup often has purple dyes in it, sizzurp tends to be purple, and is perhaps more commonly known as purple drank.

2. What’s so bad about sizzurp? So, about those opiates and antihistamines: they’re no joke. Codeine, like its more potent cousin morphine, is frequently used to treat pain. While codeine can make people feel a sense of euphoria, it can also cause itching, vomiting, and constipation, which are definitively un-fun things. Most serious, though, could be the fact that codeine can cause hypoventilation, a potentially fatal inability to breathe properly. Abuse of codeine can lead to physical dependence on the drug, which comes with a whole host of nasty withdrawal symptoms once someone tries to stop using it.

Promethazine is the element of prescription cough syrup that you may not have heard of, but it’s just as dangerous as codeine, if not moreso. Promethazine is an antihistamine that is typically used to fight nausea and to induce sedation. In low doses, promethazine can enhance the effects of codeine, causing more euphoric feelings than codeine alone. However, high doses of promethazine can also cause potentially deadly central nervous system depression and hypoventilation, extreme weakness and drowsiness, and constipation.

My version of euphoria does not involve constipation.

3. Who uses sizzurp? Sizzurp was first conceived in Houston, TX, but has since spread in the form of song references throughout hip hop music. On a basic level, it can seem as though sizzurp is “glorified in lyrics by hip-hop artists and rappers.” Name a rapper and he’s probably mentioned purple drank at some point. The most prominent face of sizzurp is the rapper Lil’ Wayne:

“I’m not a rookie, I’m a pro…methazine fiend.”

“I’m used to promethazine, in two cups, I’m screwed up.”

” I’m like a turtle, when I sip the purple.”

 

The trendy princess of rap, Nicki Minaj (you know, the one who was just at the Kids’ Choice Awards over the weekend), has an affinity for the purple drank as well:

“…and when I come, they better lean like promethazine.”

 

And now I’m getting to my point: “sizzurp” aka “purple drank” aka “lean” should not be considered something that’s isolated to the big, bad rap community. Many of the rappers who are touting this drug have fans listening even more closely than I am, and they are very often in the suburban, middle-class demographic. Indeed, I think these two girls have proven themselves her Minajesty’s biggest fans:

They may not look a thing like these rappers who’ve died from sizzurp overdose:

But they clearly have access to rap music, just like the rest of suburbia does:

Maybe they're singing Lil' Wayne songs...?

I’m definitely not saying that hip-hop and rap music should be banned in any way;  First Amendment rights, rah rah rah, and all of that. But I do think it’s up to the listeners of any kind of music to think about the meaning of the words they’re singing. Especially if you have a kid or even know kids who have access to pop radio, see if they’re picking up on drug/alcohol references, and talk with them about the ugly sides of these topics…the sides that probably won’t be talked about in the songs.

Because whereas I can hear a song and think “Sizzurp? Sounds weird,” Google it, and see that it’s dangerous, I wouldn’t trust an 8-year-old Nicki Minaj fan to Google “sizzurp” and not think “Mmm, tasty!”

Karamatic R, Croese J, & Roche E (2011). Serious morbidity associated with misuse of over-the-counter codeine-ibuprofen analgesics. The Medical journal of Australia, 195 (9) PMID: 22060082

Page CB, Duffull SB, Whyte IM, & Isbister GK (2009). Promethazine overdose: clinical effects, predicting delirium and the effect of charcoal. QJM : monthly journal of the Association of Physicians, 102 (2), 123-31 PMID: 19042969

Peters R Jr, Yacoubian GS Jr, Rhodes W, Forsythe KJ, Bowers KS, Eulian VM, Mangum CA, O’Neal JD, Martin Q, & Essien EJ (2007). Beliefs and social norms about codeine and promethazine hydrochloride cough syrup (CPHCS) use and addiction among multi-ethnic college students. Journal of psychoactive drugs, 39 (3), 277-82 PMID: 18159781