On Easter Sunday, 1967, students and beatniks flooded Central Park for a be-in. They chanted. They marched. They carried a two-foot wooden banana. The chant was "banana-banana." The New York Times covered it.
The FDA was already investigating.
A substance that did not exist had, in the span of a few weeks, triggered federal scrutiny, public demonstrations, and coast-to-coast news coverage. The joke had eaten the country whole — and almost nobody realized it was a joke.
It started, as so many strange things did in 1967, in Berkeley.
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The Berkeley Barb was the kind of newspaper that existed because someone needed to say the things mainstream papers wouldn't. Founded in 1965, it was the voice of the Bay Area counterculture — irreverent, politically charged, and read obsessively by the student radicals, draft resisters, and free-speech advocates clustered around the University of California. Its readers were people who distrusted authority on principle, who believed the government lied about Vietnam, who had watched friends get arrested for marijuana possession and asked, reasonably, why. The San Francisco Oracle operated in the same orbit — a more psychedelic, visually lavish publication that treated the counterculture as a genuine spiritual movement. Between them, they reached exactly the audience primed to believe that the establishment had been suppressing something.
In March 1967, the Barb ran an excerpt from an upcoming Oracle issue. The excerpt contained a recipe. The recipe claimed that the inner white fibers of a banana peel, when scraped, dried, and smoked, would produce a psychedelic high. The substance was named bananadine. No author was prominently credited in the way that would have flagged it as satire. Wire services picked it up. And then it was everywhere.
Donovan had released "Mellow Yellow" the previous year. The song's lyric "electrical banana" had already lodged itself in the public imagination, and rumor had long connected it to smoking banana peels — a rumor Donovan almost certainly didn't start but never aggressively dispelled. The hoax arrived into a cultural moment that had already half-prepared itself to believe it. When the Berkeley Barb recipe circulated, it didn't feel like fiction. It felt like confirmation.
Smokeouts followed almost immediately. Students at Berkeley gathered to smoke dried banana peels, reporting — or claiming to report — effects ranging from mild euphoria to genuine hallucination. Whether those effects were real, placebo-driven, or simply performed for social cohesion is impossible to say at this distance. What mattered was the behavior. The ritual was real even if the pharmacology wasn't.
By August 6, 1967, the New York Times Magazine had run a feature titled "Cool Talk About Hot Drugs" that treated bananadine as a legitimate subject of inquiry alongside actual controlled substances. The FDA announced it was formally investigating the hallucinogenic potential of banana peels. The federal government of the United States had mobilized resources to study a fruit. The hoax had achieved something its creators may have only dreamed of: it had made the machinery of prohibition look ridiculous by feeding it something absurd and watching it chew.
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What didn't add up, in retrospect, was how thoroughly the hoax resisted correction. Misinformation usually has a half-life — someone debunks it, the debunking spreads, the original claim fades. Bananadine didn't fade. In 1970, William Powell was writing The Anarchist Cookbook, a manual of countercultural disruption that he believed, sincerely, was a tool of liberation. Powell reproduced the bananadine extraction method in full, listing it under the scientific-sounding name "Musa sapientum Bananadine." He was not being ironic. He thought it was real. The Anarchist Cookbook went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies, and with it, the recipe traveled into the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s — laundered through the appearance of a serious text into something that looked like verified knowledge.
The original intent, to the extent it can be reconstructed, appears to have been philosophical provocation. The speculation among those who've studied the hoax is that the creators designed it to expose the absurdity of drug criminalization — to ask, implicitly, what would happen if the government had to regulate a banana. The answer, it turned out, was that the government would try. The FDA investigation was real. The Central Park demonstration was real. A musician named David Peel was so taken with the cultural moment that he took his stage name directly from the hoax, building an identity around the joke that most people had accepted as fact.
The anomaly that lingers is the publication strategy. The recipe appeared in the Barb as an excerpt from the Oracle — a detail that, in practice, lent it the credibility of two separate counterculture publications simultaneously. Whether that was deliberate stagecraft or simply how the content was shared is unconfirmed. But the effect was real: it looked sourced, it looked verified, it looked like something one publication had discovered and another was amplifying.
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What investigators confirmed, when anyone bothered to investigate properly, was simple: bananadine is not real. Banana peels contain no psychoactive compound. The FDA's own inquiry would have reached this conclusion. Cecil Adams addressed the hoax directly in The Straight Dope, his long-running column dedicated to factual demolition of popular myths, treating it as a case study in how counterculture credulity mirrored the mainstream credulity it claimed to oppose.
What remained contested was the original authorship. The Berkeley Barb published the recipe, the Oracle was credited as the source, but no single creator has been definitively identified as the architect of the hoax. The community of people who would have known — the writers, editors, and provocateurs clustered around both publications in early 1967 — either didn't come forward or weren't asked the right questions before the moment passed.
What the community came to believe, in the years of retrospective analysis, was that the hoax was a success on its own terms. It did what it was apparently designed to do. It made the FDA look foolish. It made the press look gullible. It made students carrying wooden bananas through Central Park look, depending on your perspective, either absurd or brilliant. The joke worked. The problem was that almost no one was in on it.
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Today, bananadine occupies a strange corner of internet folklore — documented on Wikipedia, cited in histories of the counterculture, occasionally rediscovered by people who encounter The Anarchist Cookbook and wonder if any of it is real. The FDA investigation is a historical footnote. The Central Park be-in is a photograph. William Powell, before his death in 2016, expressed regret about The Anarchist Cookbook and attempted to have it taken out of print — but the bananadine recipe, embedded inside it, had already spent decades circulating.
The question that remains isn't whether bananadine is real. It isn't. The question is what it means that a fake recipe, published once in a counterculture newspaper in March 1967, required the federal government to spend money and time confirming the obvious. The hoax asked: how far will the machinery go? The answer came back quickly, and it was: all the way. The banana was never the point. The point was the reaction. And the reaction was everything the hoax needed it to be.
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