Can banana peel offer you some kind of hallucination? The answer is no, but there was a time when some people were smoking bananas to get high!
In 1967, magazine Berkeley Barb, published a fake story about extracting hallucinogenic chemicals from bananas to raise moral questions about banning drugs. Unfortunately, people didn’t consider it a hoax and hippies began smoking banana peels to try to get high!
Here’s the full story. (the article continues after the ad)
In the 1960s, there were a lot of urban legends throughout North America that you could get hallucinogenic chemicals from fruits. One of the fruits, was banana. According to the myth, boiling, baking, and drying bananas, would create a chemical called “bananadine” which, when smoked, would offer psychedelic experience.
Based on this urban myth, Berkeley Barb, a counterculture newspaper went on to write an article on how to turn bananas into powerful hallucinogenic drugs. The article went viral and, combined with the underground word of mouth, led to rumours of people actually getting hallucinated by smoking banana. Eventually hippies started smoking banana peels thinking that they were getting high (it was of course, a placebo effect).
To fully understand how big his “banana thing” was, there were even books that contained the recipe and step-to-step guide on how to do it. Here’s one from William Powell’s The Anarchist Cookbook
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You can get William Powell’s interesting “The Anarchist Cookbook” from Amazon by clicking here.
Of course, over time, people figured out that bananadine was just a placebo effect but, to this day, the banana smoking remains one of the funniest hoaxes in history.
If you like what you read, then you will definitely love this one: Abner Doubleday, The Man Who Supposedly Invented Baseball, Had Nothing To Do With It
Photos: Mike Dorner / Unsplash, Pinterest
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