Pump up the bass!

Did you ever flush a big ol' handful of Xanax down the toilet, just to see what effect it had on the fish downstream? Me neither. But that's because you and I aren't scientists trolling for those sweet, sweet grant dollars.

That's okay, though, because those twenty-pound brains that are always pushing the frontiers of human knowledge have done it for us!

In a study to find out what effect anti-anxiety drugs had on Sea Kittens, researchers in Sweden exposed fish to levels of benzodiazepine "representing conditions that perch likely experience in streams and rivers" and discovered that they got a little hyper and "less social", I guess going to fewer fish bingo games and piscine PTA meetings or something.

Apparently not finding these results interesting enough, they decided to get the little buggers really stoned, upping the dosage to as much as 500 times higher than what they'd likely experience, perhaps simulating what would happen if the critters were to swim up the sewage outlet pipe at the Pfizer plant, and were stunned to find out that the fish got bolder, as well as getting a raging case of the munchies:

Before exposure, it took a single fish more than 4½ minutes to consume 20 zooplankton. After low levels of exposure to oxazepam, the fish ate faster, shaving about 30 seconds off the pre-exposure time. Fish exposed to the highest level of oxazepam consumed the same amount of zooplankton in less than three minutes. Not only were the exposed fish feeding faster; they also started eating earlier in the trial than they had before being exposed to the drug.

This could be bad, because the things the perch eat are things that eat algae, and too much algae is a bad thing. (No word on whether they repeated the experiment on species of fish that, you know, ate algae, to see if we could maybe get them all geeked up on Xanax and turn them loose on algal blooms...)

This being Sweden, I'm waiting to hear that at least one member of the research team, realizing that he'd gone to school for twenty-plus years only to wind up at the pinnacle of his career standing in a lab getting fish high, went home and locked all the garage doors and left the Volvo running.

So there you have it: Should you find yourself in possession of a large quantity of Xanax, don't flush it down the toilet. Give it to a Swedish scientist instead, because they are obviously too obsessive and high-strung.