Puff the Magic Dragon – Marijuana References in the Song Lyrics

First published in 1998-ish in a collection of music oriented articles I wrote for my first website, The Octopus’s Garden. Republished here for the sake of an archive of that article.

Rumors abound that the Peter, Paul, and Mary children’s hit Puff the Magic Dragon is all about drugs, particularly marijuana yet The band claims it is simply about losing the innocence of childhood. Leonard Lipton, a friend of Peter Yarrow, wrote a poem while he and Yarrow were students at Cornell. He had just turned 19, and was writing about the loss of childhood. It took him only a few minutes to type the poem once he arrived at Yarrow’s house (no one was home; so he helped himself to the typewriter) – and he forgot about it when he left the building shortly afterward:

Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called honah lee,
Little jackie paper loved that rascal puff,
And brought him strings and sealing wax and other fancy stuff. oh

Peter Yarrow wrote the song in 1958 before he joined the group. He wrote it after coming home and seeing a poem with words about the dragon. A few years later when this became a hit, Yarrow found Lipton and gave him half the songwriting credit. Lipton, who was a camp counselor when Yarrow found him, gets extensive royalties from this. Supposedly, Lipton based some of the words to his poem on an Ogden Nash poem called The Tale Of Custard The Dragon.

Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called honah lee,
Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called honah lee.

Together they would travel on a boat with billowed sail
Jackie kept a lookout perched on puff’s gigantic tail,
Noble kings and princes would bow whene’er they came,
Pirate ships would lower their flag when puff roared out his name. oh!

The original poem had a verse that did not make it into the song. In it, Puff found another child and played with him after returning. Neither Yarrow nor Lipton remember the verse in any detail, and the paper that was left in Yarrow’s typewriter in 1958 has since been lost.

Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called honah lee,
Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called honah lee.

A dragon lives forever but not so little boys
Painted wings and giant rings make way for other toys.
One grey night it happened, jackie paper came no more
And puff that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar.

In an effort to be gender-neutral, Yarrow now sings the line “A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys” as “A dragon lives forever, but not so girls and boys.”

His head was bent in sorrow, green scales fell like rain,
Puff no longer went to play along the cherry lane.
Without his life-long friend, puff could not be brave,
So puff that mighty dragon sadly slipped into his cave. oh!

At the end of the song, Puff goes back into his cave, symbolizing the loss of childhood innocence.

Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called honah lee,
Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called honah lee.

We’ve heard a rumor that the title was the nickname for a gunship used in the Vietnam War and that the song was banned in Singapore and Hong Kong because they thought it contained drug references. Some of the alleged drug references in this include the little boy’s name, Jackie Paper, which stood for rolling papers, the “autumn mist,” which was marijuana smoke, and the “land of Hanah Lee,” which was the Hawaiian town of Hanalei, famous for its marijuana plants. Yarrow insists it had nothing to do with drugs and he didn’t even know about pot in 1958. The drug rumors were fueled by an article in Newsweek magazine about hidden drug messages in pop music.
In the 2000 movie Meet The Parents, there is a debate over the meaning of this.

The first concerts of Peter, Paul, and Mary (in 1961) consisted of a solo set by each of the men, followed by a dozen songs sung as a trio. From the beginning, “Puff” was part of the trio’s repertoire. In 1962, one of Lenny Lipton’s friends heard the song in a Peter, Paul, and Mary concert and told Lipton that he had heard his poem. Peter Yarrow eventually tracked Lipton down to tell him what he did with the poem — although the song was performed for over a year, it wasn’t copyrighted until it was recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary for their second album, Moving, in early 1963.

In order to show the stupidity of calling this a drug song, the band sometimes performs “The Star Spangled Banner” at concert and pauses periodically to explain how the previous lines could describe drugs or drug-induced hallucinations.