Can’t find the image online, but the web remembers:
Mad Magazine #116, January 1968: "A San Francisco Trip". This Don Martin cartoon shows a hippie preparing some banana peel shavings in a frying pan, and trying to smoke the result in a pipe. Nothing happens. He angrily stalks away -- immediately slipping on the peel he cast aside earlier. He bashes his head (KLANG), and THEN begins seeing paisley-styled hallucinations. - Dbenson
I tried to smoke banana peels as a teenager. It is still the biggest headache I have ever had. The pain. For days. On a side note, we tried to smoke almost everything we could set on fire. Nothing we tried came even close to the pain inflicted by banana peel. Actually it wasn't the peel we tried to smoke. I don't know the English term, but it was those long strings on the side of the banana we dried and smoked. I have been told it they are pure protein and that was the reason why we got that massive headache. I have not investigated if that is true.
A friend succesfully managed (once) to get it to work when we were 12. First we lightly grilled and boiled the bananas and mixed it with some reseve rolling tobacco that his dad kept above a kitchen cabinet in an old biscuit tin. We smoked one joint and then collapsed onto the sofa. It never worked again regardless of how many times we tried.
A few years later his dad invited us to smoke a joint with him while his wife was away - and let us into his secret stash of premix, squestered in an old biscuit tin, stashed above a kitchen cabinet...
The hoax I wish would get around is that it is really good to smoke is dandelion roots. I love to imagine groups of teenagers running around at night digging out dandelions from random people's (especially mine) yards.
There are a lot of invasive species you can actually (theoretically) get high on. E.g. Phalaris, white mulberry, mugwort, non-native sweet flag, parsnips, etc.
Most (but not all) things growing in your lawn you can eat though, if the area is free from toxins. The reason we have invasive species is because they came from somewhere else, and usually the reason they came from somewhere else is because they were what people ate before we discovered/invented better crops. Or at least this is true in New England and the mid-Atlantic regions, I can't speak for everywhere else.
The juniper tree in the back yard is currently producing these very small blue berries, that, when infused with vodka produce a very delightful beverage that tastes quite similar to gin!
I used to own a book on ayahuasca combinations (DMT plus an MAO inhibitor) using temperate-zone plants. I don't recall the name, and am not finding anything. Anyone know?
Phalaris is very high in DMT, but it also has a lot of toxic chemicals in it. I'm guessing you'd die if you actually tried to smoke an extraction of it, but as far as I know no one has ever actually done it. That's where the theoretically part comes in.
Not an answer to parent comments, just wanted to emphasize that coming from "somewhere else" <=/=> invasive. Not an expert so there are likely edge cases but one example would be a meadow where many different plants grow, flowering from early spring to late autumn. Introducing a new plant could mean it finds its own niche in this system or could mean that it completely takes over the whole system, reducing the overall flowering period to a limited time and thus causing problems for pollinators. If the latter is the typical result, the plant would likely become classed as invasive.
Typically when species migrated before humans invented quick transportation, their predators migrated with them. It didn't happen very often that a species becomes invasive without humans having something to do with it.
Curious, why "super healthy"? Not that I doubt the statement, but I think it's interesting that something that I view as nutritionally insignificant is viewed that way by someone else. Then again I'm not a nutritionist or even a particularly healthy eater, more just a nutritionally curious person.
The vast majority of people who might have access to—or want to eat—dandelion are not malnourished and do not have vitamin deficiencies, and so adding dandelion to their diet will have zero net effect on their health. Swapping some vegetable out for dandelion will have zero net effect on their health. Replacing one doughnut with one portion of dandelion will have zero net effect on their health when compared to swapping out that doughnut for any other reasonable vegetable.
Individual foods are, generally speaking, neither healthy nor unhealthy. Diets are healthy or unhealthy.
But, if you eat healthy food, you don't have to eat as much to get your nutrients! And people are always trying to optimise it so that they don't have to eat as much food ;-)
It is funny the ideas that become popular, isn't it.
What's also good is sow thistle, which most people mistake for dandelion, but is a bit uglier looking. If eaten when they're young and tender, they're quite tasty and not bitter like dandelion. Whenever I spot a sow thistle in my yard, I just let it grow like any other vegetable.
They're not very bitter, but I still prefer the taste of sow thistle. I still love dandelions, though. :) They're definitely an under-appreciated and misunderstood plant.
From what I've read, they're actually beneficial for lawns as their long roots draw up nutrients from deep in the soil. Yet we pull them out and spray herbicides to kill them! I don't remember ever seeing brown patches caused by dandelions.
I used to mix dandelion shoots in with my green smoothie in the morning, when they were available. It gave the smoothie kind of a creamy effect, with a microfoam on top. It was delicious.
It's a conspiracy! The cavendish were a plant by the government designed to not get you high. The old Gros Michel banana got you super high, I swear ;)
This story happened in 1991. Like a lot of kids in high school I tried to smoke banana peels. They're wet and mushy and it was not at all obvious back in the days before the internet how you were supposed to process the things for smoking. The first time I tried it nothing happened, so I was pretty sure it was a hoax. But the second time me and a friend were bored so he had the idea to first boil, then microwave, then scrape out the soft bits and pan fry them until dry enough to smoke. We smoked this awful stuff and coughed for quite a while, but then discovered we were both extremely high. In 1991 I was very familiar with marijuana but this was quite different. Its been ages since I did stuff like that but I'd say it was like a less intense nitrous oxide, and it lasted for at least 4 hours. We tried several times after this to reproduce the recipe but had no luck. I have no idea how or why it worked that one time but it really did.
I know my friend didn't sneak something into the pipe because there is just no way he'd waste hours mucking around with banana peels if he had some drug to smoke laying around. Also I saw him attempt to make it again several times, cough his lungs out and get no happy results. It wasn't a contaminated pipe, we used a pipe freshly made out of a Coke can because banana peel will ruin anything you smoke it in. It really happened but I have no explanation for it.
This is exactly the sort of thing you'd say to make people who don't believe in the myth try to smoke banana peels anyway. "It worked that one time, oh, what a mystery, we must find the secret..."
I'll admit that I tried this once as a dumb teenager. I mixed a huge amount of nutmeg into some milk and chugged it. The experience was very slightly psychedelic and mild paranoia, but mostly just a disgustingly, overpoweringly horrible recurring flavor and scent of nutmeg for hours, which I could only describe as like being trapped in a prison of nutmeg. The mere thought of nutmeg made me nauseous for years after that.
For me at least it wasn't possible to consume enough straight up to feel the effects, but one time I put ground nutmeg into gel capsules and swallowed a ton of them. The first night I felt a mild sensation, but upon waking up the next day I was surprisingly high -- it's a bit like marijuana plus a pleasant warm feeling. Even in the capsules though I still felt a complete revulsion toward nutmeg for years afterward.
One of my friends in middle school who had CompuServe downloaded the Anarchist's Cookbook and found this gem. We all believed it. But then he got into MOD files and forgot about banana peels before we got around to trying it.
For those that don’t remember Jenkem, the hoax was that you can get high by combining shit and piss in a bottle then putting a balloon on the opening and letting the baloon fill up with gasses for several days, and then inhaling that gas.
> On September 26, 2007, the Sheriff's Department of Collier County, Florida issued an internal bulletin about jenkem based on a TOTSE internet forum post by user "Pickwick", which included purported photos of the manufacture and use.[6] "Pickwick" confessed it was a hoax around the time of the internal bulletin.[14] In November of that year, officials at the Drug Enforcement Administration said no reports of jenkem use had been confirmed in the United States.[15]
I always thought it was a meme too, and surely no one was dumb enough to believe or try it... then I volunteered at the med tent at a Rainbow Gathering in Wyoming. I can confirm at least one use of jenkum in the United States.
My older siblings used to have little packets of "beadies" (Packaged dry banana skins rolled into thin tubes) that I used to try every now and then. Packaging looked a bit like incense. Then of course we have nutmeg..
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/large-doses-nutmeg-hallucinoge...
Most deliriants/anticholinergics are toxic at the doses you need to take for strong psychoactive effects.
It's a dangerous game to play around with such substances. Very interesting results however if you're willing to take the plunge. You have full-fledged hallucinations of objects and events, and dear god the spiders.
Similar to "Steal this Book" and its advice on marijuana:
> There are two other ways that we know work to increase the potency of grass
you grow or buy. One consists of digging a hole and burying a stash of grass
wrapped in a plastic bag. A few months in the ground will produce a mouldy
grass that is far fuckin' out. A quick method is to get a hunk of dry ice, put it in a
metal container or box with a tight lid (taping the lid airtight helps), and sprinkling
the grass on top. Allow it to sit tightly covered for about three days until all the dry
ice evaporates.
Smoking mouldy weed is a very bad idea. I get this was mean to be a prank, but people (OK, idiots) trying this could end up with serious health issues because of this.
> A quick method is to get a hunk of dry ice, put it in a metal container or box with a tight lid (taping the lid airtight helps), and sprinkling the grass on top. Allow it to sit tightly covered for about three days until all the dry ice evaporates.
Not only will it explode, scattering their stash to the four winds (or all over the floor), but most people who'd fall for that are probably teenagers and most likely end up drawing parental attention to their experimentation. So they'll blow up their stash and get themselves busted all at once.
It would pass quickly enough for me and was never so bad my buddy or I had to vomit. And my prep was just to smash them up small and slowly chew the hard bitter little pieces. Maybe 4-8 seeds in one go.
FYI instead of the recipe in that ancient Rome I have personal experience that 30 grams of clean washed seeds ground up in a blender to " black pepper " consistency then mixed into a ice cream shake ( in the same blender) will produce a desirable result.
Collect the seeds yourself , this plant is a weed in cali, it's everywhere and once you have learned to identify it you will be happy you did
I've had the best luck with the brilliant violet colored flowers although there is a cream colored variety that works well too, it's just not as agressive as a noxious weed as the violet type.
The cream colored variety is a much smaller vine
Mad Magazine #116, January 1968: "A San Francisco Trip". This Don Martin cartoon shows a hippie preparing some banana peel shavings in a frying pan, and trying to smoke the result in a pipe. Nothing happens. He angrily stalks away -- immediately slipping on the peel he cast aside earlier. He bashes his head (KLANG), and THEN begins seeing paisley-styled hallucinations. - Dbenson