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Acid Lore: The Great Banana Hoax
Acid Lore: The Great Banana Hoax
Imagine if a cheap, readily available pantry staple could offer you limitless—and completely legal—psychedelic experiences. Wouldn’t that be fantastic? Enter Musa sapientum, the fruit otherwise known as the humble banana. Some called it ‘Mellow Yellow’, some called it Bananadine or Bananadine Acid or simply Banana Sunshine, the store cupboard psychedelic…
As teenagers growing up in Yorkshire, England in the 1980s, my budding psychonaut friend and I had heard rumours that if you dried ripe banana peel and then smoked it, it would become psychoactive as the peel contains bufotenine, the same psychedelic chemical found in toad skins. We’d heard that Donovan had even written his 1966 hit “Mellow Yellow” about it: ‘Electrical banana is gonna be the very next craze….’
And a banana-flavoured joint is surely more appealing than licking a toad…
Not having a recipe, we dried ripe banana skins on hot radiators. They turned black and slimy and were impossible to light. Thus, our quest to open the doors of perception with bananas proved ultimately fruitless.
But the entirely spurious belief that smoking dried banana peel gets you high has proven remarkably persistent, despite being regularly debunked as a myth. Its origins are slippery, but it seems to have begun with articles in the underground press about how to dry banana skins to extract the ‘bananadine’ powder which could then be smoked.
A wave of banana smoking swept through the hippy scene, and this was picked up by the press – and soon Mellow Yellow was everywhere. Donovan, Country Joe and the Fish, the underground press, anarchists, and the Food and Drug Administration all play a part in the story of how the banana became a short-lived symbol of the hippy underground. It’s also a story of how government laboratories created banana smoking machines to isolate its elusive hallucinogenic compounds.
Electric Bananas for Mind and Body
In February 1967, legendary psychedelic rock band Country Joe and the Fish flew to Vancouver for a concert. On the flight, drummer Gary ‘Chicken’ Hirsh told Country Joe MacDonald that you could get high by smoking dried banana peel, as it contains THC like cannabis. After arriving in Vancouver, the band headed to the nearest store and stocked up on bananas which they then took to a nearby hippy shop and asked if they could bake the peels in the oven.
When they were dry enough, the band scraped the white stuff off and smoked around twenty joints of it before going on stage for their final set – and that’s when it hit them. Tripping wildly, they couldn’t stop playing their song ‘Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine’ and ended up doing a 45-minute version of it. When they came off stage, they ran back to smoke some more, crying (according to Country Joe’s website) ‘Man this shit really works, I am so high I can’t believe it.’
After the gig, Joe and the band began telling everyone they knew of the wonder drug they had found. When they returned to Berkeley, at a gig in California Hall the band passed five hundred banana joints around the crowd telling them it would get them high.
Country Joe and the Fish
However, what the band had forgotten is that as they were smoking the banana joints in Vancouver, they had also been taking copious swigs from a jar of water at the side of the stage that was full of LSD for the band (it was the 1960s). They were tripping on acid, not banana joints.
In his column in the underground newspaper The Berkeley Barb, ED Denson, the band’s manager, wrote about being turned on to the fruit in the issue dated 3 March, 1967–and this seems to be the first print reference to the practice. The ‘recipe of the week’, Denson wrote, was to scrape the pith of banana peels, dry them in the oven until they can be crumbled, and then smoke in a joint. The effect, supposedly, was similar to opium. Denson also suggests soaking grass in banana oil (for ‘those who feel experimental’).
In the same issue, an anonymous letter to the editor claimed that the Berkeley police narco squad hung out around the grocery section of the local Co-op. They had been assigned to observe people buying large amounts of bananas. There was also the suggestion that the government was planning to criminalize the possession of a certain quantity of the fruit.
In a 2022 interview with Psychedelic Scene, Country Joe and the Fish drummer Gary ‘Chicken’ Hirsh described what happened next:
‘At any rate, the following weekend, you couldn’t buy a banana any place in the Bay Area. It was like Safeway stores sold out of bananas. At the Co-op in Berkeley, you couldn’t get a banana. And since then, I’ve learned that it just swept the nation. It went all over the world. You know, we’ve run into people in England who tried smoking bananas. You know, the underground press jumped on it. The Federal government ended up testing to see if there was anything in them.’
Gary "Chicken" Hirsch
Trip on a Banana Peel
Enterprising hippies began drying bananas and selling the powder ready to smoke in $5 ‘psychedelic turn-on bags’. ‘Trip on a banana peel,’ their adverts in the underground press said, ‘Mellow Yellow is here.’
Indeed, Donovan’s 1966 hit “Mellow Yellow” was perfectly timed with its lyrical references to being ‘born high forever to fly’ and how ‘electrical banana is gonna be a sudden craze’. It seemed obvious to many that Donovan was trying to turn the world on to the psychedelic delights of smoked banana skin. However, in his autobiography The Hurdy Gurdy Man, the Don writes that the song was a ‘cheeky little number’ that was influenced by his smoking of the green herb, not the yellow fruit. The song was a throwaway party piece that producer Mickie Most decided should be the next Donovan single. The ‘electrical banana’, Donovan says, was a nudge-nudge, wink-wink reference to a magazine advert for a vibrator.
By the end of March, articles began to appear in the mainstream press about the latest youth drug craze. The New York Times of 27 March described how the crowds at an Easter ‘be-in’ in Central Park were chanting ‘Banana! Banana! Banana!’ By 30 March, The Wall Street Journal was reporting that marijuana farms were lying idle as students were instead getting stoned on bananas.
Ban the Banana – Repeal the Peel: The Banana Labelling Act of 1967
The banana smoking craze even made an appearance in the US congressional record on 9 April, 1967 thanks to New Jersey politician Frank Thompson‘s tongue-in-cheek speech. ‘From bananas,’ he said, ‘it is just a short but shocking step to other fruits… Tomorrow we may face strawberry smoking, dried apricot inhaling, or prune puffing.’
Thompson proposed a ‘Peel Corps’ of ‘swinging’ young Americans to travel to the jungle and observe the effects of bananas on their biggest consumers – monkeys. Furthermore, those banana-smoking beatniks should be targeted with new legislation, the Banana Labelling Act of 1967. Just as cigarette packs carried government health warnings, so should bananas: ‘Caution: Banana peel smoking may be injurious to your health.’
‘I will only breathe easier,’ he said as he finished his impassioned speech, ‘when this country, this land we all love, can declare, “Yes, we have no bananas; We have no bananas today”‘.
The Banana Smoking Machine
Although Thompson was clearly jesting, concern was growing about the supposed mind-altering effects of bananadine, and so the US Food and Drug Agency stepped in. To test the hallucinogenic properties of the fruit, a banana peel smoking machine was constructed that trapped the smoke in tubes so it could then be analysed. Several different processing recipes were tried, as was banana juice. The results were clear. Bananas didn’t contain any known psychoactive chemicals. The FDA’s tongue-in-cheek press release on 26 May, 1967 summed up the results of the experiment: ‘A laboratory apparatus ‘smoked’ dried banana peels for more than three weeks and never did get high’.
‘Was it all a hippy hoax?’ the FDA asked.
Taking the Pith
So, did a hippy hoax fool both the counterculture and the mainstream media alike? Gary Hirsh’s account suggests he really believed bananas could get you high, as does Country Joe’s account. On other occasions, though, Country Joe claimed he knew it was a hoax all along, and it’s hard to ignore the satirical element in the banana craze. If governments legislate against psychoactive herbs and fungi, what would it do if a common foodstuff could be easily turned into a drug by any kid with access to an oven? And, of course, the banana is the most comical of fruits.
East Coast Origins
Although the Country Joe and the Fish story is the most well-known origin of the banana rumour, there is a rival account, again involving the underground press, but this time on the east coast. In his autobiography, Confessions of a Raving Unconfined Nut, underground publisher Paul Krassner described a visit to the office of the East Village Other newspaper. There he met the editors who were speculating that as LSD caused the release of serotonin in the brain, then perhaps bananas (which contain serotonin) might have a similar effect. Krassner suggests that the editors were confusing serotonin with ‘serotin’, though this makes no botanical sense. Bananas do contain small amounts of serotonin, but it’s not going to get you high, no matter what you do with it. In any case, Krassner claims that this is where the idea came from which was then picked up by the Berkeley Barb.
So, it’s unclear whether the Great Banana Hoax began as a deliberate piece of hippy satire to bait the authorities, a genuine belief in the psychedelic properties of the fruit’s dried peel, or a simple misunderstanding. Perhaps the myth had been floating around for a while before Country Joe and Paul Krassner got to hear about it. There can be no doubt, though, that what makes this piece of drug lore unusual is that the underground hippy press played a key role in its spreading.
Too Much Monkey Business
Despite regular debunking, the mellow yellow myth persisted and was certainly helped along by a recipe included in William Powell’s infamous Anarchist Cookbook in 1971. Along with tips and tricks for the amateur terrorist–like making explosives and hand-to-hand combat training, there are instructions for processing bananadine. This is probably the best-known recipe, though if you plan on trying it, you’re going to need a lot of bananas:
Take 8 pounds of ripe bananas (that’s about thirty) and scrape the pith from the inside of the peel. Add this to water and boil for three or four hours before straining and then continue to boil until reduced to a black tar-like paste. Spread on a cookie sheet and bake on a low heat until dry and it can be crumbled into joints.
How many eager psychonauts tried the recipe is impossible to tell, but the number must be very high – unlike the smokers themselves.
Placebo and Psychedelia
However, it’s understandable that many believed in the psychedelic effects of Mellow Yellow. Like Joe and Chicken, they may have smoked their bananadine while they ingested LSD or marijuana and confused the effects of those drugs with the bananas. Banana smokers may have been in a setting that included trippy light shows and psychedelic music, and the powerful placebo effect might have done the rest.
Although the banana peel hoax of 1967 is most likely an amusing piece of hippy satire that went viral (as we might say nowadays), it also reflects the quest for the ultimate organic high that could be hiding in plain sight. When Country Joe heard that the FDA’s banana-smoking apparatus had found no hallucinogenic properties in the fruit, he suddenly remembered that in Vancouver, as well as smoking bananadine, they had also been drinking acid-spiked water. Joe went over to Chicken’s house and told him that bananas didn’t work – it was the LSD that got them high.
‘Forget about that,’ Chicken replied. ‘If you smoke a cigarette through a bell pepper it gets you really stoned…’
Speaking of peppers, according to Paul Krassner, the Los Angeles Free Press wanted in on the hallucinogen hoaxes, too. The Free Press, in turn, decided to promote yet another hallucinogenic fruit: ‘pickled jalapeno peppers, anally inserted.’
‘All over Southern California,’ Krassner claims, ‘heads were sticking vegetables up their asses.’ But that’s a story for another day.
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