Bananadine
fictional drug
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. The Barb claimed that the recipe was excerpted from an upcoming San Francisco Oracle issue, likely to add credibility to the hoax.
History and influence
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". David Peel took his stage name from the hoax.
The original hoax was designed as a sort of thought experiment to raise questions about the ethics and practicality of making psychoactive drugs illegal and prosecuting those who took them: "what if the common banana contained psychoactive properties, how would the government react?" Nonetheless, the idea of smoking banana peels was taken seriously. Columnist Cecil Adams reported in The Straight Dope:
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 public source identifies “Bananadine” as fictional drug. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Bananadine, fictional and drug.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q600416. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1967 and 1966.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bananadine” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.