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Smoking Banana Peels

I used to work on a site called The Sputnik Drug Information Zone. The site was devoted to information on inebriants both popular and obscure. We had a small humor section which included articles about the great put-on that smoking banana peels will get you high.

You can find a “bananadine” extraction recipe in The Anarchist Cookbook, and the legend was allegedly the inspiration for Donovan’s folk-rock song “Mellow Yellow” (“E-lec-trical banana / Is gonna be a sudden craze”). The band Country Joe & the Fish claim to have passed banana joints to their audiences.

One story I heard makes the hoax out to be a yippie prank planted in the Berkeley Barb in 1967 and designed to throw the authorities into a tizzy wondering how they were going to crack down on the banana trade.

Anyway, the articles on our site were parodies of some of the sillier urban legends and amateur chemist nonsense that were circulating on usenet several years ago. But in spite of their tongue-in-cheek nature, and the fact that they were posted in the Humor section of the site, I often get email from people asking me to help them with their “bannadine” extraction method.

Below is the original article, and off to the right you’ll find excerpts from some of the email I’ve received (and yes, I still get these emails — even in response to this very page).

The Definitive Instructions for Smoking Banana Peels

  1. Go to the grocery store and buy 10 pounds of bananas. (You used to need 200 pounds, but the potency has gone up 20x in the last 30 years.)
  2. Remove the skins from the fruit. Save the fruit for later — if you mix it with orange juice and drink it while you’re smoking, it’ll make you trip real hard.
  3. Dry the skins in the microwave. This won’t affect the potency, as bannadine is not microwave soluble.
  4. The next two steps are a simple nonpolar-polar extraction of the bannadine. This is necessary to get rid of the fungicide they put on the skins, which is a type of strychnine. Grind up the dried peels really well, and soak them in methylene chloride (zippo lighter fluid makes a good substitute). Let soak for 2 days, and then rinse well with ether. Discard the liquid and save the mush.
  5. Take the mush from step 4 and soak it in ethyl alcohol for another 2 days. Filter, and put the mush aside — you won’t be smoking it.
  6. Evaporate the alcohol. The resultant crystals are 150% pure bannadine. Put these in your pipe, light up and enjoy! (Keep reading for the secret step 7!)
  7. Bannadine is normally only active when smoked; that’s why eating bananas won’t do anything. However, that mush left over from step 5 is pretty tasty, and that’s how I discovered that bannadine is orally active if potentiated by dried peanut skins! Yes, its true. I looked up the structure, and it turns out bannadine is really closely related to DMT — it has carbon atoms and everything!

Hope this helps! And all of you who say bananas don’t work can just shut up.

From: pixie@netcom.com (David Van Assche)

ANDERSON, LARRY S (lsanders@unccvx.uncc.edu) wrote:
okay... i’ve heard a little about smoking banana peels from different sources (the dead milkmen :) ) but what does it really do? how do you prepare the peels for ingestion? what is the usaual effective dosage? and which neurotransmitters in the brain are most effected? any info you are willing to share would be of great help. also, any info on growing herb. and processing it. please reply email, because i often don’t have the time to look through all of these posts. thank you much...

Ok, Banana peels have a substance called Bananadine in them which is a psychoactive tryptamine chemically related to LSD and DMT. I would say it lies somewhere in between. Now, to extract the Bananadine one must scarpe the chemical from the inside of the banana peels and then there are two ways to freebase it. It is only active if you smoke it, although I’ve heard of some people injecting it (Although this is dangerous because banadine has strychnine in it, permenantly binding the bananadine to the spine, where crystals may form if taken too often)

Anyway, to freebase, the best method is to mix 1/3 banandine with 2/3 baking soda (Bicarbonate) and then slowly mix in water and bring the mixture to boiling temperature. You should be left with a rock like substance which looks very much like crack (hence… the street name: Banrack) This is then smoked through a crack pipe for best results… or simply heat and inhale the fumes. The other way is to simply make a joint with the bananadine and smoke it…. but this smoking it pure gives more of a Peanut high effect, which is undesirable for some people.

Bananadine works by entering the blood stream and going to the brain where it is converted to the neurotransmitter Bananodin, where it is taken up by a group of receptors called the Bananyocine receptors.

The high is very very intense, and one can get addicted to it the first time you take a hit, mostly because of the action of strychnine, which inhibts the bananyocine receptors and causes chromosome damage, which can eventually lead to a fluctuation in hormone levels causing men to grow breasts…

I would recommend you to try it though cause its defenitly worth the high it gives…. ohhh… and it also makes sex the most intense thing ever experienced… orgasms are heightened to the extent that some people are known to have gotten heart attacks…

 — Debaser (David Laurence)


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On This Day in SniggleryNovember 21, 1953: The British Museum publishes its study showing that the “Piltdown Man” fossils were faked. (See Archaeological Forgeries for information on pickled relics)