“Trip” on a Banana
Source: The Sunday Bulletin April 23 1967
Author: Art Buchwald
This humorous article demonstrates the level of anxiety parents had over their kids using psychedelics in the late 1960s. Here, Art Buchwald shares a story he experienced of finding his son eating a banana in the morning for breakfast. Mr. Buchwald believes that kids are secretly smoking banana peels to get high, much the same way they used cannabis and LSD to reach altered states of awareness. Buchwald ends up smoking the banana with his wife and son. The only “trip” they experienced was going to the bathroom as the smoke gave them all the runs.
According to an article written by Aditya Mohanan, the banana craze had spread across the nation after the hammer came down on LSD. The discovery that bananas contained both serotonin and norepinephrine led desperate hippies to purchase crate loads of bananas. As an odd by-product of these banana experiments, the very people testing their fruits for psychedelic qualities inadvertently discovered how good potassium is for the human body. Mohanan’s article can be read here