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Spend any time listening to Peter Yarrow, the folk musician who died Tuesday at 86 years old, and you’re bound to discover “Puff, the Magic Dragon” – a ballad performed by the trio Peter, Paul & Mary that has long been interpreted to be about marijuana use, even though Yarrow himself long insisted against the idea.
The song, sometimes referred to as simply “Puff,” was based on a poem by Yarrow’s Cornell University roommate Leonard Lipton. While in school as an undergrad, Yarrow took the poem, which told the story of a dragon, and set it to music. The song was later featured on the 1963 album “Moving” by Peter, Paul & Mary, with Yarrow sharing songwriting credit with Lipton.
The folk song tells the story of a dragon named Puff who goes on an adventure with a child named “Jackie Paper.” On the surface, the lyrics appear to be about the loss of childhood innocence:
“A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys/ Painted wings and giant’s rings make way for other toys/ One gray night it happened, Jackie Paper came no more/ And Puff, that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar,” the song goes.
But many have interpreted the lyrics to be full of veiled drug references. For example, the character Jackie’s last name is “Paper” … as in rolling papers. And the lyric “by the sea” was speculated to mean “by the C,” as in “cannabis.” There are also many references to mist and smoke, not least the dragon’s name. And, of course, “dragon” itself has been interpreted to mean “draggin’” – as in taking a drag from a joint.
The interpretation has persisted among the public for decades. In 1984, the New York Times published a letter to the editor where the writer said “it is disingenuous to use the song as a symbol of innocuous intent,” adding that it is about “drugs and drug use.” According to Yarrow, radio stations removed the song from their track lists and at least one church minister was barred from playing the song at events.
But Yarrow and Lipton were adamant for decades that the song wasn’t about drugs at all. “It is not, and it never was,” Yarrow told Florida Today in a 2017 interview.
“It is an imbecilic reality that we just have to live with now,” he told Florida Today. “It won’t stop me from singing it and asking children to come and join me on stage and sing along with it either. It’s lovable enough to last, and I won’t let that die.”
According to Yarrow, the drug reference interpretations began after “a guy at a magazine” added the song to his list of tunes with drug references.
“I asked him once about it and he basically said he was just looking for a third and thought, ‘maybe this will work,’” Yarrow said about the conversation.
Yarrow had tried to quash the idea 10 years earlier, when he told Reuters that drug culture had not yet emerged when the song was written. “I was 20 years old at Cornell in 1959 when it was written and I was so square at that time, as was everyone else,” he said. “Puff was a good dragon and would never had had drugs around him.”
“Puff, the Magic Dragon” still has a beloved reputation. The song inspired an animated special in 1978 with two sequels and a book adaptation. Noted marijuana fan Elon Musk even named one of his space capsules after the song.
In the 2000 comedy “Meet the Parents,” the strait-laced Jack Byrnes (played by Robert De Niro) admitted he adored the song but didn’t know it to be about drugs.
And in the 2004 sequel, “Meet the Fockers,” Jack uses the song’s opening tune as the sound for the horn of his RV.