Bananas are still legal in most states
It’s not as good a a pot high, but what the hell, the cops can’t arrest you
The recipe calls for 15 pounds of bananas (ripe), peeled one by one. The fate of the fruit itself is ultimately in the hands of the chef, though the instructions rather reasonably suggest they be consumed orally prior to moving on to the third step. Here the knife enters the picture (though one imagines a spoon or even fork could be employed to similar effect), scraping the pulpy flesh from the inside of the peel.
The extracted flesh is then added to a pot, along with water (no measurements given) and boiled for three to four hours, until the contents have congealed into a “solid paste consistency.” This material is then spread thinly on cookie sheets and heated in an oven (no temperature given) for 20 to 30 minutes, at which point it should have dried into a black powder. This is your pay dirt. “Bananadine,” according to The Anarchist Cookbook, can be rolled and smoked, giving the user a kind of light psychedelic effect.
The kitchen-based narcotic immediately invokes stories of nutmeg consumption outlined in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, the effects of which the the civil rights leader refers to as akin to “the kick of three or four reefers.” His flirtation with the spice was a desperate measure spurred on by life behind bars. And while he doesn’t appear to have been exactly recommending chugging a “penny matchbox” worth of the stuff with a glass of water, nor does he devote time to detailing its downside.
William Burroughs, never one to shy away from the darkest clutches of addiction, wallows in the side effects of the desperation spurred high. “Results are vaguely similar to marijuana with side effects of headache and nausea,” the author writes in Naked Lunch. “Death would probably supervene before addiction if such addiction is possible.”
Alter ego William Lee apparently only had the stomach to try it once.
The high from banandine, one the other hand, is practically dreamy by comparison. First printed in the Q4 1968 issue of Economic Botany, A.D. Krikorian’s research paper, “The Psychedelic Properties of Banana Peel: An Appraisal” describes the effect thusly,
One of the many chemicals contained in the fruit Musa sapientum (the common banana fruit), banadine has been found and claimed by many to possess mild, short lasting pyschedelic properties. These effects are apparent when one smokes 1-4 cigarettes containing banadine powder (and bananas are still legal in most states).
The author was hardly alone in launching in such academic assessments. Less than three years after a prototype Grateful Dead opened for Ken Kesey’s inaugural acid test in Santa Cruz County, the notion of household psychedelics didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility. The signs, at least, were everywhere.
The druggy folk rock of Donovan’s “Mellow Yellow” peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot 100, the Scottish singer cryptically insisting,
Electrical banana
Is gonna be a sudden craze
Electrical banana
Is bound to be the very next phase
Decades later, the musician would tell NME that his lyrical flirtation with the chemical was, in fact, accidental. The abstraction was instead a passive allusion to something far more terrifying: female sexuality. “[John] Lennon and I used to look in the back of newspapers and pull out funny things and they'd end up in songs,” he told the music magazine. “So. it's about being cool, laid-back, and also the electrical bananas that were appearing on the scene - which were ladies’ vibrators."
The apparent origin of the phenomenon arrived five months after the song’s U.S. release, as an unassuming column in the two-year-old Berkeley Barb alternative weekly. Music promoter Ed Denson offered what may well have been the first published account of the recipe that would later appear in The Anarchist Cookbook as part of his regular “Folk Scene” column. The latter’s instructions hewed closely to Denson’s, which he noted had been learned from Country Joe and The Fish – a band he happened to manage at the time.
The next issue followed the theme, with an article titled “Pick Your Load, Banana or Toad,” offering an alternative method for preparing bananas that involved freezing and blending the fruit. It also pointed to a different naturally occurring ingredient,
A doctor, who wishes to remain anonymous (bananymous?) says that banana peels contain serotonin, a chemical found naturally in the human body [ …] The doctor says if you add a dimethyl ring to serotonin (which may happen when banana skins are baked) a new chemical compound, bufotenine, is created. Bufotenine is a well-known hallucinogen, found in toadstools and toad skins and used by South American Indians.
From here, the story spread across the country, often perpetuated by wary squares. Later the same month, The New York Times described the scene at an Easter Be-in. “ ‘Banana! Banana! Banana!’ one dark-haired youth, sitting atop a friend's shoulders, carried a two-foot wooden banana.” The author quickly cites a 28-year-old welfare department employee, who notes, “It’s not as good a a pot high, but what the hell, the cops can’t arrest you.”
By the end of the year, The American Journal of Psychiatry published a paper, noting the influence of an altogether different element.
“The recent practice of smoking dried banana scrapings to achieve a ‘psychedelic experience’ led the authors to investigate the hallucinogenic properties of bananadine, or ‘mellow yellow,’ ” the researchers note. “They conclude that the ‘active ingredient’ in bananadine is the psychic suggestibility of the user in the proper setting.”
Sources:
The Psychedelic Properties of Banana Peel: An Appraisal https://www.jstor.org/stable/4253000#metadata_info_tab_contents
The Great Banana Hoax https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/abs/10.1176/ajp.124.5.678
Berkeley Barb Volume 4, Issue 11(83) 03-17-1967
10,000 Chant 'L-O-V-E'; L-O-V-E IS THEME OF PARK 'BE-IN' https://www.nytimes.com/1967/03/27/archives/10000-chant-love-love-is-theme-of-park-bein.html