Probably best read and appreciated when moderately illuminated on a good Sativa.
Smoking Banana Peels Is the Greatest Drug Hoax of All Time
Drug scares are a dimebag a dozen, but the hysteria surrounding fake drugs is always fascinating to behold. 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. 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.
Rumors of bananas as narcotics began swirling around the hippie scene in the mid-1960s. “Young people in the ’60s were looking for new ways to get high. 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. “But pot cost money, and hippies had little money. Bananas were cheap, so if banana scrapings worked, this would be a really cheap high. That’s why people fell for it.”
As 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. 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. Realizing that bananas also contain serotonin, the eager hippies invented the concept of smoking bananas.
More at: http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles...eid=49f33fbc3d