For those not old enough let me explain that in the 60’s it would have been hilarious to the readership of this type of paper to see the government ban banana peel smoking. Most of the young people would have found this hilarious. I just wish it hadn’t become a 40 plus year old fact that many people believe to this day.
Banana skins are not hallucinogenic.
“Were”? They are incredibly credulous, and it’s the worst thing about them. They believe anything at all someone tells them, even if it contradicts what they already believe themselves. It’s endlessly frustrating listening to their mad ideas.
No, the worst thing is the self-righteousness. Credulousness is only second worst, but that’s still pretty bad - the Earth Mother stuff, the half-digested Eastern stuff, the conspiracy theories… anyway, yes, you’re right that some of them are still that way. My father apparently believed until recently (or maybe he still does) the “cops can’t lie about being cops” thing. I’m not sure how he got through the 60s and 70s without a huge rap sheet.
In all time periods there are people that are suckers and pass on gossip as fact. I really don’t believe it was the people using drugs that kept this alive. It’s the people that don’t do recreational drugs and are gullible that spread the banana farce.
A roommate of mine once had a copy of the Anarchist’s Cookbook, where I first heard about the banana peel thing. It was written unambiguously as fact, as far as I remember.
I suspect this is where a lot of people got that belief from. I sort of dismissed on grounds of ‘just too good to be true’. Sort of.
Well, there’s his problem. The title “Anarchist Cookbook” (or “Anarchist’s Cookbook” or “Anarchists’s Cookbook” and so on) has been applied to any number of collections of random destructive information, with the sole constant that all of it has been anywhere from laughably wrong to dangerously misleading. There’s a certain entertainment value in those heinous little tracts, but very little scientific worth in any form.
Yep - it was always a joke to us but there was always some fool who thought we were serious. It was the same with the really spaced out cosmic babblers - we were laughing at them too, if a bit more kindly.
