Scientists think hungry sharks might be feeding on drugs dumped off the Florida coast and sending them a little crazy.

An upcoming episode in Discovery Channel’s latest installment of Shark Week, “Cocaine Sharks,” looks into the theory, with its title referencing the “cocaine bear” that ingested nearly 75 pounds of cocaine in 1985 — and loosely inspired a comedy-horror film that came out earlier this year.

“It’s a catchy headline to shed light on a real problem, that everything we use, everything we manufacture, everything we put into our bodies, ends up in our wastewater streams and natural water bodies, and this aquatic life we depend on to survive are then exposed to that,” Tracy Fanara, a Florida-based environmental engineer and a lead member of the research team, told The Guardian.

Studies had shown that pharmaceuticals including cocaine, methamphetamines, and ketamine had affected fish, Fanara said.

Huge bales of cocaine have washed up on Florida’s beaches for decades, usually the result of traffickers throwing them into the sea while fleeing law enforcement.

The US Coast Guard said it had recovered more than $186 million’s worth of illegal narcotics in the Caribbean and Atlantic last month.

If these cocaine bales are a point source of pollution, it’s “very plausible” sharks can be affected by this chemical, Fanara said. “Cocaine is so soluble that any of those packages open just a little, the structural integrity is destroyed, and the drug is in the water.”

In the upcoming Shark Week episode, Fanara and the British marine biologist Tom Hird conduct a series of experiments to determine whether the sharks in waters around Florida were consuming the dumped narcotics and whether this affected them.

The scientists did observe unusual behavior by some of the sharks, The Guardian reported.

This included a hammerhead swimming directly toward them while moving erratically, despite the species typically avoiding humans.

And at one point, a sandbar shark was swimming in circles as it appeared to focus on something, despite nothing being there.

The scientists created packages that resembled cocaine bales and dropped them into the water to see how the sharks would respond. The sharks swam straight to the bales and took bites out of them, the outlet reported.

They also filled balls of bait with highly concentrated fish powder to simulate cocaine and see how the animals would react.

“It set their brains aflame. It was crazy,” Hird says on the show, The Guardian reported.

Researchers said the reaction was similar to that of catnip on felines.

However, the observations do not necessarily confirm that the sharks consume drugs, and Hind told LiveScience he hopes the show will lead to more research in the area.