[Hoax] Banana contains psychoactive substance

Musa sapientus banadine or 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 recipe tells us that the substance is easy to extrahate: you peel a couple of bananas, scrape the inside of the peels with a knife and cook the scrapings for about three to four hours in water until it forms a thickish paste. Then you have to dry the paste in an oven until it turns black. Powder the end result and it can be added to your tobacco. You might experience the first effects after three cigarettes.

Folklore tells us that inmates in American prisons produce LSD-like substances by drying the banana peels and getting high on the natural drugs that would result from these peels. But it is all a hoax. The 'discovery' of bananadine happened just at a time when marijuana was decided to be made illegal and users of marijuana were searching for a legal substitute.

Already in November 1967, researchers at New York University found that banana peel contains no intoxicating chemicals, and that smoking it produces only a placebo effect.

Nonetheless, bananadine became more widely known when William Powell, believing the Berkeley Barb article to be true, reproduced the method in The Anarchist Cookbook in 1970, under the name 'Musa sapientum Bananadine' (referring to the banana's old binomial nomenclature).

Powell later tried to distance himself from his 'The Anarchist Cookbook' by saying: 'It was written during 1968 and part of 1969 soon after I graduated from high school. At the time, I was 19 years old and the Vietnam War and the so-called 'counter culture movement' were at their height. … The book, in many respects, was a misguided product of my adolescent anger at the prospect of being drafted and sent to Vietnam'.