Bananadine is a fictional psychoactive substance which is supposedly extracted from banana peels. A hoax recipe for its "extraction" from banana peel was originally published in the Berkeley Barb in March 1967. [1]
Bananadine is a fictional psychoactive substance which is supposedly extracted from banana peels. A hoax recipe for its "extraction" from banana peel was originally published in the Berkeley Barb in March 1967. [1]
Just a few months earlier, Donovan's hit single "Mellow Yellow" (1966) had been released, and in the popular culture of the era, the song was assumed to be about smoking banana peels. On August 6, 1967, shortly after the song's release, bananadine was featured in a New York Times Magazine article titled "Cool Talk About Hot Drugs". [2]
Although the original hoax was designed to raise questions about the ethics of making psychoactive drugs illegal and prosecuting those who took them ("what if the common banana contained psychoactive properties, how would the government react?"), [3] Cecil Adams reports in The Straight Dope : [4]
The wire services, and after them the whole country, fell for it hook, line, and roach clip. "Smokeouts" were held at Berkeley. The following Easter Sunday, the New York Times reported, "beatniks and students chanted 'banana-banana' at a 'be-in' in Central Park" and paraded around carrying a two-foot wooden banana. The Food and Drug Administration announced it was investigating "the possible hallucinogenic effects of banana peels".
Nonetheless, bananadine became more widely known when William Powell, believing the Berkeley Barb article to be true, reproduced the method in The Anarchist Cookbook in 1970, under the name "Musa sapientum Bananadine" (referring to the banana's old binomial nomenclature). In 1971, a book of one-line joke comics was released, containing a comic in which a teen is secretly handing bunches of bananas to a zoo gorilla at night, uttering the line: "Just throw the skins back, man!" [5]
The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act was a United States federal law that regulated and taxed the production, importation, and distribution of opiates and coca products. The act was proposed by Representative Francis Burton Harrison of New York and was approved on December 17, 1914.
The Summer of Love was a social phenomenon that occurred during the summer of 1967, when as many as 100,000 people, mostly young people sporting hippie fashions of dress and behavior, converged in San Francisco's neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury. More broadly, the Summer of Love encompassed the hippie music, hallucinogenic drugs, anti-war, and free-love scene throughout the West Coast of the United States, and as far away as New York City.
A bong is a filtration device generally used for smoking cannabis, tobacco, or other herbal substances. In the bong shown in the photo, the smoke flows from the lower port on the left to the upper port on the right.
The blue star tattoo legend is an urban legend which states that a temporary lick-and-stick tattoo soaked in LSD and made in the form of a blue star, or of popular children's cartoon characters, is being distributed to unknowing children in any given area.
Mole people are homeless people living under large cities in abandoned subway, railroad, flood, sewage tunnels, and heating shafts. The term may also refer to the speculative fiction trope of an entirely subterranean society or a race of humanoid moles.
Jennifer Ninel Toth is an English-born journalist and writer.
A designer drug is a structural or functional analog of a controlled substance that has been designed to mimic the pharmacological effects of the original drug, while avoiding classification as illegal and/or detection in standard drug tests. Designer drugs include psychoactive substances that have been designated by the European Union as new psychoactive substances (NPS) as well as analogs of performance-enhancing drugs such as designer steroids. Some of these were originally synthesized by academic or industrial researchers in an effort to discover more potent derivatives with fewer side effects and shorter duration and were later co-opted for recreational use. Other designer drugs were prepared for the first time in clandestine laboratories. Because the efficacy and safety of these substances have not been thoroughly evaluated in animal and human trials, the use of some of these drugs may result in unexpected side effects.
"The Straight Dope" was a question-and-answer newspaper column written under the pseudonym Cecil Adams. Contributions were made by multiple authors, and it was illustrated by Slug Signorino. It was first published in 1973 in the Chicago Reader as well as in print syndication nationally in the United States, and on a website with the same name.
David Peel was a New York City–based musician who first recorded in the late 1960s with Harold Black, Billy Joe White, George Cori and Larry Adam performing as David Peel and The Lower East Side Band. His raw, acoustic "street rock" with lyrics about marijuana and "bad cops" appealed mostly to hippies and the disenfranchised.
The Berkeley Barb was a weekly underground newspaper published in Berkeley, California, during the years 1965 to 1980. It was one of the first and most influential of the counterculture newspapers, covering such subjects as the anti-war movement and Civil Rights Movement, as well as the social changes advocated by youth culture.
"Mellow Yellow" is a song written and recorded by Scottish singer-songwriter Donovan. In the US, it reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. Outside the US, "Mellow Yellow" peaked at No. 8 in the UK in early 1967.
Ed Zotti is a journalist and urban transit planner in Chicago, Illinois. He is credited as being the "editor and confidant" of Cecil Adams, the pseudonym of the writer of the column "The Straight Dope".
David Kehr is an American museum curator and film critic. For many years a critic at the Chicago Reader and the Chicago Tribune, he later wrote a weekly column for The New York Times on DVD releases. He later became a curator within the department of film at the Museum of Modern Art.
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A banana peel, called banana skin in British English, is the outer covering of the banana fruit. Banana peels are used as food for animals, an ingredient in cooking, in water purification, for manufacturing of several biochemical products as well as for jokes and comical situations.
Jenkem is an inhalant and hallucinogen created from fermented human waste. In the mid-1990s, it was reported to be a popular street drug among Zambian youth. They would reportedly put the feces and urine in a jar or a bucket and seal it with a balloon or lid respectively, then leave it out to ferment in the sun; afterwards they would inhale the fumes created.
A banana split is an American ice cream-based dessert consisting of a peeled banana cut in half lengthwise, and served with ice-cream and sauce between the two pieces. There are many variations, but the classic banana split is made with three scoops of ice cream. A sauce or sauces are drizzled onto the ice cream, which is topped with whipped cream and maraschino cherries. Crushed nuts are optional.
The Lower East Side Band was an American rock band from Manhattan, New York.
Terms related to cannabis include:
