GURP

By: John David Cochran

Having been in the penitentiary for an unfortunately large part of my adult years, I’ve had my finger involuntarily glued to the pulse of prison parlance. I am intimately in touch with the special language spoken behind bars and the vernacular that infuses day to day conversation here.

A new word crept its way into the prison patios a couple of years ago with which I was unfamiliar. Gurp. On any given day, walking around the yard, one is almost certain to hear one prisoner ask another, “Hey man, got any gurps?” I knew It had something to do with drugs, specifically illicit pharmaceuticals, but I didn’t know which one. I didn’t really care. Here, trouble sticks to drugs like hair on soap and I had all the trouble I care for a long time ago.

As the word gurp evolved from a noun into a verb, “Check out Two-Bit-Tony; he sure is gurped out today,” and then into an adjective whereby one may be gurpified, gurptastic or even gurpalicious, I had to sit up and pay attention.

Prison is full of dope. Alongside the old standards, pot, coke, meth and heroin that come in through guards and visitors, are black market psychotropics issued to inmates at pill line every day: Thorazine, Haldol, Elavil, Xanex and others. Although the pharmacy doesn’t provide the Ferris wheel of fun that street drugs do, there is a place on the midway for any head change in this circus of doom.

Over sixty percent of the inmate population takes some sort of psychiatric medication. The Department of Corrections owns…