Pirate's Banana Joints

[Jade Becker]

Hey folks,

I'm in the middle of Danny Goldberg's *In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967
and the Hippie Idea*, and he describes the false story that circulated in
1967 about how "people could get high scraping the inside of banana peels,
boiling the residue, drying it, rolling the resulting 'bananadine' into a
joint, and smoking it." The myth became so prevalent--in part because of
LSD users who smoked 'bananadine' while already high (and thus believed it
heightened the effect)--that Congressman Frank Thompson started rallying
for the Banana Labelling Act, a piece of legislation that would require
bananas to be labeled with warning stickers like cigarettes. The FDA had
eventually come out and confirm that bananas contained no hallucinogenic
effects.

This was news to me (youngster that I am), and it brought Pirate's banana
breakfasts to mind. I haven't been able to re-read that section of *GR *yet,
but I wouldn't be surprised if Pynchon were riffing on the banana-smoking
phenomenon in some way or another.
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