Mellow Yellow (the fake drug, not the song) had arrived. By the end of March, 1967, stories about the banana smoking trend were gracing the pages of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Other hippie magazines began picking up the story, not to mention running ads for people selling banana-based “psychedelic turn-on bags” and the like. The Barb continued to report on the supposed effects of banana peels, running stories with titles such as “Pick Your Load, Banana or Toad” and “Mellow Yellow Future Bright,” which included spurious claims regarding the various substances contained in bananas that gave them psychedelic effects. As noted in a recent article on the subject by Judy Berman at Extra Crispy, word of smokable bananas spread like wildfire thanks to the Underground Press Syndicate, which allowed small papers, such as the Barb, to freely share content with one another. In the same issue, a letter from a reader claimed to have noticed an increased police presence surrounding a co-op banana stand in Berkeley, California, lending even more credence to the banana hoax.įrom there, the banana craze took on a life of its own. The lead singer of the band also claims to have been a father of the banana-smoking craze, having passed out 500 banana joints at one of their concerts. Densen reported that he’d heard about the recipe from members of the band Country Joe and the Fish, which he also managed. In his column “Folk Scene,” the writer Ed Denson presented a “Recipe of the week,” where he described a method of preparing banana peels for smoking by scraping out the white pith and drying it out in an oven before rolling it up in a joint. Wherever the hoax originally started, it was a short piece in a March 1967 issue of the counterculture magazine Berkeley Barb that seems to have kicked off the wider craze. Donovan would later state definitively that the song was actually written about a yellow vibrator, but lyrics such as “Electrical banana / Is gonna be a sudden craze / Electrical banana / Is bound to be the very next phase,” didn’t help. Nonetheless, the rumor quickly gained traction based on word of mouth.Ĭoincidentally, in early 1967, the Scottish songwriter and recording artist Donovan’s song “Mellow Yellow” was making its way to the U.S., and at the time, many people assumed that it was about smoking banana peels. Realizing that bananas also contain serotonin, the eager hippies invented the concept of smoking bananas.įor the record, while it is true that bananas contain some amount of serotonin, it is too slight to cross the blood-brain barrier. According to Krassner’s version of the myth’s origin, the editors of the paper were discussing the mechanics of LSD and serotonin in the brain, and then began to wonder if something more natural could produce the same effect.
That’s why people fell for it.”Īs relayed in an extensive 2012 article by the Local East Village about the history of the craze, the counterculture publisher Paul Krassner claims that the rumor began in the publishing offices of The East Village Other. Bananas were cheap, so if banana scrapings worked, this would be a really cheap high. “But pot cost money, and hippies had little money. It was a highly experimental era driven perhaps most by LSD and by growing pot use,” says the historian William Rorabaugh, who’s written multiple books about the 1960s including American Hippies. “Young people in the ’60s were looking for new ways to get high. Rumors of bananas as narcotics began swirling around the hippie scene in the mid-1960s. But few of these viral blips approach the lasting influence, and outright silliness, of that time in the 1960s when people started smoking banana peels. Even today, mythical ways of getting high, from the gross-out nonsense that was Jenkem to the digital absurdity of “ i-dosing,” are still popping up in the popular consciousness. Anybody got a light? Alexas_Fotos/Public Domainĭrug scares are a dimebag a dozen, but the hysteria surrounding fake drugs is always fascinating to behold.
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