I don't know anything about smoking banana peel but in the 60's and 70's I know of people rolling their pot in banana paper. I don't know if the product was made from bananas or if that particular paper was used to wrap banana hands. I lived by United Fruit Co.

As a product of the 60's myself, I think you are off by about a decade :-) The whole hoopla about banana peels producing a psychedelic high started in 1966 with the release of Donovan's 'Mellow Yellow'. While not about bananas at all (song actually refers to a yellow vibrator), this is considered to be the source of the 'banandine' furor, although the SF hippie community was already into the 'cheap' (compared to pot or LSD) high that supposedly was generated by the banana peels (although completely unfounded).

So not beatniks in the 50's but hippies in the 60's :-))

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bananadine

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/smoking-banana-peels-1960s-donovan-mellow-yellow-hoax

I remember my husband's dope head cousin talking about it, but that was in probably '64 or '65. I would hardly call her a beatnik though. She did a lot of drugs, drank heavily and was a prostitute. Eventually over dosed and died.

Banana paper was just a yellow, banana scented rolling paper.

No. No banana peels in the beat generation. Pot was used. Reefer Madness. LOL Heroin, opium and sometimes hashish. Psychedelics hadn't really hit until later. I do remember references to Peyote.

In the sixties we had flavored rolling papers. Banana was one, also strawberry. I remember jokes about banana peels being smoked but I didn't actually know anyone who did it in the 60s. Real drugs were plentiful. Why use bananas?

Marilyn, I'm not talking about banana flavored rolling papers but a brown, harsh, fiber-type paper.

"Real drugs were plentiful. Why use bananas?"

Because bananas were cheap....compared to pot or LSD. And hippies were not known to have much cash :-)

I was in college during the 60's. I remember the time well (not precisely sure why, as I shouldn't :-)). I do not remember any references to bananas before the middle of that decade. And this was one of the earliest cases of fake news.....there is nothing psychedelic about banana peels.........

In the Haight and in Berkeley you really didn't have to pay for drugs unless you were a hard core user. People were more than happy to share. If you hitch hiked you might be so high by the end of the ride you might forget where you were going. LOL At the the Fillmore, The Avalon and at outdoor concerts drugs were passed out like candy. Summer of Love and all that. At a two day Folk Rock concert I attended a "HOG lady" passing out HOG what we now know was PCP. Made the news since so many tripped out on bad trips.

Here is what I am groping for:

Bananas, meaning crazy, is relatively recent. Green’s Dictionary of Slang dates it only to 1957, so, does anyone have any recollection of the well documented Bananadine before 1957?

You mean the much joked about hoax about the fictional bananadine, right?

It's all in the links I posted earlier in this thread.

Once again, bananadine was not heard of or the term coined before 1967!!!

Didn't some Beatnicks in the late 1950's become followers of Timothy Leary and his advocacy of LSD?

LSD ruined their working careers later on due to a nasty effect of LSD. It is fat soluble, therefore it can be stored in a person's body for a long period. When the body decides it needs to use a particular store of fat that contains LSD, the LSD is released and that person can experience a 'trip' many days to months after taking LSD. For this reason, many employers adopted a policy of not hiring a person if they discovered he had ever taken LSD.

LSD was patented as a psychiatric drug in the late forties. Allen Ginsberg was one of his early disciples. He asked to join in the Harvard research in 1960. It wasn't until 1963 when the patent expired. Leary started advocating its use around the time. The drug was legal in the US until 1968.

I have never heard of any reference to it being stored in fat cells. As far as I know they have never been able to determine why some people have flashbacks and others don't. There are people who experience flashbacks after a single hit and those that never have flashbacks after hundred of hits. Yes those people did exist.

Personally I never became a fan. It was interesting but I am too much of a "control freak" to do drugs or alcohol to escape day to day realities. Drugs were plentiful in my coming of age years and I tried many. But I was never much of an escapist, personality wise, I guess.

The only addiction I ever had, and it was a bad one was to cigarettes. I finally broke the habit 42 years ago and never looked back. I didn't want my children to smoke. I had my last cigarette on the way to the hospital to give birth to my DD.