Cough medicine makers launch sizzurp awareness campaign

The nation's leading DXM cough medicine makers launched the "Five Moms Campaign" today, a media vehicle aimed at stopping the teen trend of using cough syrup to get high. Here is a video sample of the low-budget infoganda at work:

I grabbed news of this campaign via AllHipHop.com, which sheds some more insight into the history of DXM abuse in the hip-hop community:

The concoction of cough syrup mixed with codeine was turned into "Sippin' On Some Sizzurp," a hit single for rappers Three Six Mafia in 2000.

The mixture's most well known victim may be DJ Screw, a pioneering Houston DJ who sold hundreds of thousands of copies of his mixtapes from his Houston-based record store, Screwed Up Records and Tapes.

Screw, born Robert Davis, died at the age of 30 in Nov. 2000, after suffering a fatal heart attack in his studio, while sipping a deadly combination of codeine and cough syrup.

Five Moms is just the latest in an ongoing effort by "industry groups" to fight drug abuse with media propaganda. There are also recommendations being considered at the state level to make DXM cough remedies available only to adults with ID. If these recommendations pass, this would be the first de facto prohibition of OTC meds for purely recreational reasons, essentially creating a whole new class of "Behind the Counter" (or BTC) drugs.

So, if I was getting high on NyQuil, would that be the next to go BTC? Stay tuned.