Essay/Term paper: Smoking banana peels

Essay, term paper, research paper:  Alcohol and Drugs

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. "