Smoking Banana Peels Essay, Research Paper

Smoking Banana Peels

Back in the 1960s a lot of young poeple took drugs and these people

would try anyhing to get a “high.” One Craze was called ” Smoking Banana Peels ”

and that is what this is about .

It all started around 1967 when somebody wrote a letter to a hippie

paper in Berkeley , California to the ‘ Berkeley Barb ‘ and explained how to

smoke a banana peel to get high. First you have to peel the banana peel and then

scrape the white material that is next to the peel out . You then must put this

white material in the oven at 200 Degrees C. until it is dry then roll it into a

cigarette. A bunch of other hippie papers copied the instructions and it became

a craze and even TIME and NEWSWEEK wrote about it.

Someone I know says he smoked banana peels once but he was “tripping” on

mushrooms at the time so he didn’t know if it made him high or not. A friend of

mine tried smoking banana peels recently and he sasys it only gave him a little

bit of a headache.

Scientists said that their is a chemical in the banana peels called

serotonin and norepinephrine that are related to hallucinogens such as LSD or ”

Acid ” but it still doesn’t work. Some people say the banana craze was started

by some hippies as a hoax because you can’t make bananas illegal. A man from the

United Fruit Company said in NEWSWEEK ” The only trip you can take with a banana

is when you slip on the peel. “