Was Puff the Magic Dragon a song about drugs?

The 1960s sure were crazy times. The era has become one with drug use and many songs from that era have been tainted with the suggestion that they are about drugs. Was Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds really a code for LSD? (John Lennon always denied this accusation saying that the title was inspired by a drawing that his son had drawn and named). Did the Byrds Eight Miles High refer to a plane ride or some other type of flight? The biggest surprise of all was realizing that Puff the Magic Dragon was actually a song about smoking weed.

When one looks at the lyrics, it is easy to see how this story spread. The name of the song was pretty cheeky. Puff was another word for smoke and dragon could be divided into two words for the term drag. He took a drag on the pipe and a drag on the joint. Also, what did people who smoked marijuana use to make their joints? documents. And what is the name of the boy in the song? It was Jackie’s piece of paper. Some have even suggested that Hanah Lee’s magical land was really Hanalei; a Hawaiian town known for its potent brand of weed.

However, the song’s writers state that Puff The Magic Dragon was a song about the loss of innocence and a boy who outgrew his childish ways. The song began life as a poem written by a 19-year-old Cornell University student, Leonard Lipton. He showed the poem to his friend Peter Yarrow, who set the poem to a melody and added more lyrics. Yarrow went on to form the band Peter, Paul and Mary and his portrayal of Puff went to number two on the charts.

It wasn’t until after the song charted that the theory that it was a drug song came to light. It is a theory that still exists today despite many public statements by authors to the contrary. Lipton claimed that his poem was based on the Ogden Nash poem “Really-O, Truly-O Dragon”. He wrote that “[It is about] the loss of innocence and having to face the adult world. Surely it’s not about drugs. I can tell you that at Cornell in 1959 nobody smoked weed… It would be insidious to propagandize about dugs in a song for little kids.”

Peter Yarrow would later add the following comment: “When Puff was written, I was too innocent to know about drugs. What kind of mean-spirited son of a bitch would write a children’s song with an undercover message about drugs?”