Slowdown.(The Talk of the Town)(financial crisis)

A few months back, as the modern financial system was revealing itself to be a hyper-stimulated and under-funded wreck, some unfamiliar merchandise turned up in midtown, along with a pitch: "This might be just the thing for jittery Wall Street right now." The merchandise was liquid--a six-pack of tall purple cans with the word "DRANK" printed beneath a drawing of what looked like a bottle of Robitussin, along with the slogan "Slow Your Roll." To a hip-hop fan, if not to a banker, the allusion is obvious: purple drank is a kind of instant moonshine, originating in the Houston rap scene, and consisting primarily of cough syrup and 7UP. (Variations abound, some featuring Jolly Ranchers.) It's a sedative, and therefore well suited to the slow, vaguely psychedelic Southern rap favored by artists like Lil Wayne, whose song "Me and My Drank" includes the lyrics "I'm a sip until I lean hard / Drink got me moving slower than a retard. . . . One more ounce will make me feel so great / Wait, now I can't feel my face."

If you think of Red Bull, with its glorified but dubious ingredient, taurine, as in some ways emblematic of the housing boom, then here, perhaps, was something grounding to take a day trader's eye off the relentlessly correcting ticker. The canned version, which is billed as an "anti-energy drink" and an "extreme relaxation beverage," will do nothing for your congestion; its active ingredients are melatonin, rose hips, and valerian root. (The homespun stuff works best with codeine and promethazine.) "Eight ounces really puts you to sleep," a publicist said. Each can contains sixteen ounces: a Rip Van Winkle special. It tastes like a faintly carbonated grape Kool-Aid, with hints of Dimetapp.

Before a recent office party, a journalist, moonlighting, in the spirit of the business cycle, as a social scientist, devised an experiment to test the Drank. As a control, competitor beverages were selected from the swag cabinet: Borgnine's Coffee Soda (as in Ernest) and Folonari Pink Pinot Grigio--upper and downer. A variety of office-related sobriety tests were assigned, with marks for both competence and style--from walking the line (an old standard), to using an eyelash curler (fine motor skills), to sending faxes (operating heavy machinery). Observations were made as well about the socio-emotional reactions of the human subjects, all of whom were female. We'll call them Purple, Pink, and Brown, in accordance with the colors of liquid in their plastic lab cups.

"I'm drinking Barbie's blood," Pink said, dropping in a few ice cubes to dull the taste of her screw-top wine. (A bystander, sampling the pink Folonari, had described it as Manischewitz Lite.) ...