City Lights:

I will do my best to write this column without nodding off. After all, I just consumed a 16-ounce can of Drank.

For those unfamiliar with said product, it’s the new “extreme relaxation beverage” that’s marketed as the antithesis of Red Bull. Peter Bianchi, the drink’s inventor, lives part of the year in Huntington Beach, and his PR firm sent me three cans of Drank in the mail the other week.

You may have heard of Drank already, as the drink has been written up over the last two years in Time, Woman’s World and even the New Yorker.

Its name caused a mild controversy, as “purple drank” is a slang term for a narcotic brew associated with the hip-hop scene, but Bianchi insists his product doesn’t promote drug use.

He also challenges naysayers who doubt Drank’s health benefits, noting that the its key ingredients — melatonin, valerian root and rose hips — are all approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

The mission of Drank, to quote the slogan at the bottom of the can, is to “slow your roll.”

Sometimes a reporter has to be a guinea pig, so I waited until my most stressful day of the week, Tuesday, when we put most of the Independent to bed, and downed a can of the purple stuff shortly after arriving at work.

Drank comes in a container noticeably taller than a typical soda can (and probably twice as big as a Red Bull), which, combined with the word “relax” printed large below the rim, hints that slumber is on the way as soon as you pop the top. Take your first sip and it tastes like ordinary grape soda, at least at room temperature. Then the effects kick in.

In the New Yorker profile, reporter Ben McGrath described conducting an “experiment” on three of his colleagues, serving Drank to one, coffee soda to another and wine to a third, and testing to see how well each was able to perform tasks around the office. The Drank-taker, McGrath wrote, found herself dozing off and making sloppy mistakes with the fax machine, then began viewing shopping websites and fell asleep before she could buy anything.

Well, I fared better than she did. But even before I finished my can of Drank, I started to feel a little buzzed, and the sluggishness persisted throughout the day. As I answered the phone, edited columns and completed my stories for the week, I felt my eyelids getting heavy and my head craving a pillow. It was all I could do not to flash a peace sign around the office and end every sentence with “dude.”

Of course, that was Bianchi’s intention. A former drummer in the music industry, he told me he created Drank as a way of calming his nerves before he went onstage. Now, he said, he empties two or three cans a day.

“I’m up at 6 in the morning and at my desk until 8, 9, 10 o’clock at night,” he said. “If I can’t have that SoCal feeling or be able to put my flip-flops on, I want something throughout the day that’s going to help me relax.”

And that’s all well and good. But as an editor, I need to stay alert during the week. So from now on, I’ll reserve Drank for those sleepless weekend nights and stick with Red Bull on deadline.

City Editor MICHAEL MILLER can be reached at (714) 966-4617 or at michael.miller@latimes.com .