Are Medicare Prescriptions Fueling Purple Drank? An Iodine Data Story, Iodine, March 13, 2014

According to our research, there is not only a significant drug diversion problem going on with Medicare prescriptions (a problem that has been well accounted in a recent Pro Publica report published in the Pacific Standard), but it is likely that drugs prescribed to American seniors under Medicare are actually ending up in party cocktails – particularly promethazine, a drug that is prescribed to reduce nausea and motion sickness. Promethazine is often combined with codeine in a prescription cough syrup.

Promethazine with codeine is a key ingredient in the illicit brew known as Lean, Sizzurp, or Purple Drank. Mixed with Sprite soda and Jolly Rancher candies and served in styrofoam cups, the concoction is a popular party drink and a frequent reference in hip hop lyrics. The drink is especially popular in the South, having originated in the Houston area and spread to Atlanta and other southern areas. It often leads to abuse, as in Lil’ Wayne’s case.

(The fact that Justin Bieber has also recently been connected to Purple Drank suggests that the drink’s popularity may indeed have maxed out).

Catholicism, George W. Bush, and the cluelessness of the religious right, Damon Linker, The Week, April 11, 2014

Once upon a time, the religious right’s leading intellectuals told themselves an inspiring story. It went something like this: From the time of the Puritans all the way down to the early 1970s, American public life was decisively shaped by the moral and spiritual witness of the Protestant Mainline’s leading churches: The Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, and Episcopalians.

But then the Great Collapse began, as these venerable churches sold their souls to the counterculture, abandoned the moral and religious tenets of historical Christianity, embraced a series of increasingly left-wing and anti-American causes, and saw their numbers (and then their cultural influence) plummet. Today these churches are an intellectual and demographic shell of their former selves.

This was a potentially disastrous development, depriving America of the theologically grounded public philosophy that it needs in order to thrive. But as luck — or providence — would have it, the decline of the Mainline churches set in at the precise moment when two other monumental cultural and religious developments unfolded: The rise of a politicized form of Protestant evangelicalism and a revival of intellectual and spiritual energy in the Catholic Church under Pope John Paul II. The time was ripe for evangelicals and Catholics to come together to form a successor to the Mainline churches.

Photo credit: By Stickpen (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.