Berkeley Barb - Banana Skins and Other Hoaxes

Banana Skins and Other Hoaxes

Max Scherr had a satirical sense of humour and used the Barb as a vehicle for comedy as well as news. One of the Barb's most famous covers showed a boy with a chain around his mind. Another cover, printed in green ink, depicted the body of a dead hog. The headline read Pig Slain!. This issue sold rapidly as readers sought additional information on what they thought would be an article on a killing of a police officer because law enforcement officials were sometimes known as "pigs." Search as they might, there was nothing in the paper that related to the cover.

In March 1967 Scherr, hoping to trick authorities into banning bananas, ran a satirical story which claimed that dried banana skins contained "bananadine", a (fictional) psychoactive substance which, when smoked, supposedly induced a psychedelic high similar to opium and psilocybin. The Barb may have been inspired by Donovan's 1966 song "Mellow Yellow", with its lyric "Electrical banana/Is gonna be a sudden craze." The hoax was believed and spread through the mainstream press, and was perpetuated after William Powell included it in The Anarchist Cookbook. A New York Times article on illicit drugs by Donald Louria, MD, noted in passing, that "banana scrapings, provide— if anything—a mild psychedelic experience." The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) investigated and concluded that banana skins were not psychedelic.

The Barb was itself subjected to hoaxes. At a memorial for the social activist and founder of the Yippies, Stew Albert, the following story was told:

One victim of an Albert prank was Max Scherr, editor of the Berkeley Barb, that legendary paper of the days of "the Movement." "A lot of Jewish kids were converting to Buddhism then," Paul Glusman said, so Albert cooked up a hoax, getting a letter mailed from Japan to the paper reporting that "all the Buddhist kids in Japan were converting to Judaism." Scherr ran the letter.