Authors: Alex Boese
The story of Sir Francis and the chicken is not merely of biographical interest. It highlights the central role animals have played throughout the history of experimental science. It is hard to imagine where modern science would be without the untold number of animals who have served as guinea pigs in experiments. Researchers sometimes study animals for the sake of increasing scientific knowledge about animal behavior, but more often they’re using animals as a stand-in for humans. The idea is to try something on an animal first, and hope it works the same way in humans. Whatever the reason for the use of animals, it is a truism that, as we shall see in this chapter, the behavior of the researchers is often far more curious than the behavior of the animals they’re studying.
Tusko the elephant led a peaceful life at the Oklahoma City Zoo. There were his daily baths, playtime with his mate, Judy, and the constant crowds of people peering at him from the other side of the fence. Nothing out of the ordinary. So when he awoke in his barn on the morning of Friday, August 3, 1962, he could hardly have foreseen what that day held in store. He was about to become the first elephant ever given LSD. He would simultaneously become the recipient of the largest dose of that drug ever administered to any creature—a record that stands to this day. If he had known what was about to happen to him, he probably would have made a run for it.
The experiment was the brainchild of two doctors at the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine—Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West and Chester M. Pierce—as well as Warren Thomas, director of the Oklahoma City Zoo. All three men were impressed by the effects of LSD and were eager to learn more about the drug’s pharmacological properties. So, in an effort to expand the frontiers of psychiatric knowledge, they turned their restless imaginations to elephants.
In fairness to the men, they were not alone in their interest in LSD. At the time, there was a great deal of research into the drug, for a number of reasons. Doctors were fascinated by LSD because of the powerful effect it had on patients. It seemed like a wonder drug, able to heighten patients’ self-awareness, facilitate the recovery of memories, and entirely alter patterns of behavior. There were reports of it curing alcoholism almost overnight. Many hoped it might have a similar effect on schizophrenia. It wasn’t until the mid-1960s that doctors became more concerned about the drug’s dangers—and its popularity among counterculture youth—which prompted the U.S. government to ban its use.
More shadowy forces were also promoting LSD research. The Central Intelligence Agency was extremely curious about the military applications of the drug. Could it be used as a debilitating agent in chemical warfare or as a brainwashing tool? To get answers to these questions, the agency was funneling large sums of money to researchers throughout America. Virtually everyone who was anyone working in the behavioral sciences at the time received CIA money, though many weren’t aware of it because the agency disseminated funds through various front organizations. There is no evidence, however, that the CIA played any role in the elephant experiment.
Finally, psychiatrists were interested in LSD because its effects seemed to mimic the symptoms of mental illness. It produced what they called a “model psychosis.” Quite a few doctors took the drug to gain a more intimate sense of what their patients might be experiencing, and researchers were testing LSD on animals in the hope they could experimentally simulate mental illness and thus examine the phenomenon in a more controlled way. Giving LSD to an elephant was, in a sense, the logical outgrowth of such studies.
But the three researchers were particularly interested in elephants for additional reasons. First, the animal’s large brain size offered a closer analog to a human brain. Second, male elephants experience periodic episodes of madness known as musth. When they go into musth, the males become highly aggressive and secrete a strange sticky fluid from their temporal glands, which are located between their eyes and ears. West, Pierce, and Thomas reasoned that if LSD truly did trigger temporary madness, then it might cause an elephant to go into musth. If this happened, it would be a powerful validation of LSD’s ability to produce a model psychosis. Best of all, the onset of musth could be easily confirmed by looking for the secretion of the sticky fluid.
This was the scientific rationale offered for the experiment. But a small element of ghoulish inquisitiveness must also have been involved. After all,
what would an elephant on acid do?
It’s hard not to be curious.
On the morning of August 3, the experimenters were ready. Thomas had arranged for the use of Tusko, a fourteen-year-old male Indian elephant. The pharmaceutical company Sandoz had provided the LSD. Just one thing was missing—knowledge of the appropriate amount of LSD to give Tusko. No one had given an elephant LSD before.
LSD is one of the most potent drugs known to medical science. A mere twenty-five micrograms—less than the weight of a grain of sand—can send a person tripping for half a day. But the researchers figured an elephant would need more than a person, perhaps a lot more, and they didn’t want to risk giving too little. Thomas had worked with elephants in Africa and knew they could be extremely resistant to the effect of drugs. So they decided to err on the side of excess. They upped the dose to 297 milligrams, about three thousand times the level of a human dose. This, in hindsight, proved to be a mistake.
At eight a.m. Thomas fired a cartridge syringe into Tusko’s rump. Tusko trumpeted loudly and began running around his pen. For a few minutes his restlessness increased, then he started to lose control of his movements. His mate, Judy, came over and tried to support him. But suddenly he trumpeted one last time and toppled over. His eyeballs rolled upward. He started twitching. His tongue turned blue. It looked like he was having a seizure.
The researchers realized something had gone wrong and took measures to counteract the LSD. They administered 2,800 milligrams of an antipsychotic, promazine hydrochloride. It relieved the violence of the seizures, but not by much. Eighty minutes later, Tusko was still lying panting on the ground. Desperate to do something, the researchers injected a barbiturate, pentobarbital sodium, but it didn’t help. A few minutes later, Tusko died.
If ever a situation justified an exclamation of “Oh, crap!” this was it. Tusko’s death had definitely not been part of the plan. He was only supposed to go a little mad—run around his enclosure, trumpet a few times, maybe secrete some fluid to indicate he had gone into musth—and then a few hours later be right as rain. He shouldn’t even have had a hangover. But instead, the researchers now had a dead elephant at their feet and a lot of explaining to do.
What had happened? Frantically, West, Pierce, and Thomas tried to figure that out. Had the LSD concentrated somewhere in Tusko’s body, increasing its toxicity? Had they hit a vein with the cartridge syringe? Were elephants allergic to LSD? They really had no clue. An autopsy performed later determined Tusko died from asphyxiation—his throat muscles had swollen, preventing him from breathing. But why his throat muscles had done this, the researchers didn’t know. In an article published a few months later in
Science
, they simply noted, “It appears that the elephant is highly sensitive to the effects of LSD.”
Meanwhile, reporters had immediately learned of the experiment and were phoning the zoo, trying to find out details. Lurid headlines appeared in papers the next day—
FATAL RESEARCH: DRUG KILLS ELEPHANT GUINEA PIG!
and
ELEPHANT DIES FROM NEW DRUG
. The local paper, the
Daily Oklahoman
, ran the headline
SHOT OF DRUG KILLS TUSKO
on its front page. Beneath these words, a photo showed West bending over the lifeless body of the elephant.
Some of the most sensational details of Tusko’s death first appeared in these news stories published the day after the experiment. However, much of the reporting resembled a game of Chinese whispers. What information came from West, Pierce, and Thomas, and what came from the imaginations of the reporters wasn’t always clear. For instance, the Associated Press reported that the amount of LSD given to Tusko “was less powerful than the contents of an aspirin tablet.” It’s hard to imagine one of the experimenters saying this. What was probably said, if anything, was that the amount of drug given to Tusko was comparable, in weight, to the amount of medicine in an aspirin tablet—although the potency of the two drugs is vastly different.
The same AP story stated that “one of them, Dr. L. J. West, professor of psychiatry at the University of Oklahoma, had taken a dose of the drug Thursday.” The story dropped this bombshell and then casually moved on, as if scientists self-dosing with LSD before experiments was standard operating procedure. The modern reader, coming across the statement, can’t help but do a double take—
Huh? Come again?
If West took the drug Thursday he could still have been strung out on Friday when Tusko received the drug. This information, if true, would cast the experiment in a new, even more psychedelic-hued light.
The
Daily Oklahoman
, whose reporter presumably had better access to the experimenters, made a similar claim, but stated it more ambiguously: “Dr. West said he and Dr. Chester Pierce, chief of psychiatry at Veterans Administration Hospital, had taken LSD prior to Tusko’s injection.” This could mean they took the drug the day before, or a year before.
It’s difficult to know the truth. The researchers filmed the entire experiment, but the film remains hidden away in an archive at UCLA, where West later went to work. It has never been made accessible to the public. However, those who have seen it report that all three researchers appear perfectly sober throughout the experiment. This suggests reporters once again misinterpreted something they had heard.
Whatever the case may be, the idea of West and Pierce, high on acid, stomping around an elephant pen, quickly took root and was often repeated in retellings of the story. The Church of Scientology, in its attacks on the psychiatric profession, later singled out West and hammered him with this accusation, portraying him in their publications as an out-of-control researcher who was “evidently still under [LSD’s] influence at the time he sloshed through the beast’s entrails, performing an ‘autopsy’ which he recorded on film.” (This accusation was at least partially incorrect since the autopsy was not filmed.)
One more detail stands out from the news stories. The
Daily Oklahoman
quoted Dr. Thomas as saying that Tusko “was no toy. He was getting hard to manage and had to be handled strictly from a distance. He might have been a potential killer.” To many this sounded like a callous attempt to legitimate Tusko’s death. But Thomas wasn’t finished. The experiment
shouldn’t
be considered a failure, he opined. After all, they had learned that LSD is lethal to elephants. This was potentially useful information. “Maybe LSD would be a more effective way of destroying herds in countries where they are a problem,” he suggested. One elephant on acid wasn’t enough. Thomas was imagining entire herds of elephants, roaming the African savanna, tripping on LSD before stumbling forlornly to their deaths.
To the scientific community, the entire experiment was an embarrassment. Other researchers took West, Pierce, and Thomas to task for so clumsily misjudging the appropriate amount of LSD to give Tusko. Paul Harwood, a veterinary biologist, wrote a letter to
Science
describing what they had done as an “elephantine fallacy.” But, oddly, the experiment made the researchers minor celebrities within the counterculture. West later remarked that when he was studying hippies during the late 1960s, he could gain instant access to their community by identifying himself as the guy who had given LSD to an elephant.
But the final chapter in the elephants-on-acid story was not yet written. It still had to become “elephants”—plural!
In 1969 West joined the faculty of UCLA. Ronald Siegel, a professor of psychopharmacology who later became one of his colleagues there, became interested in the experiment. Questions about it lingered. For instance, was it the LSD that had killed Tusko, or was it the combination of drugs? And could LSD actually induce musth? In 1982 Siegel decided to find out. He later said, “I couldn’t let the obvious mistakes and procedural errors of this ‘experiment’ remain uncorrected.” He set out to give LSD to more elephants.
Going into the project, Siegel had a number of advantages over his predecessors. For a start, he was one of the world’s leading experts on the effects of hallucinogens on animals. He also had his predecessors’ example to learn from. Basically, he knew what not to do.
Siegel obtained access to two elephants (one male, one female) that lived in a barn at an undisclosed location. It is rumored he had to sign an agreement promising to replace the animals in the event of their deaths. Instead of using a cartridge syringe to deliver the drug, Siegel put the LSD in the animals’ water—after first denying them water for twelve hours to make sure they would be thirsty. This ensured a more gradual entry of the drug into their systems. He tested the elephants at two different dosages—a low dose of .003 mg/kg and a high dose of .1 mg/kg. The high dose was equivalent, in terms of amount per body weight (but not in terms of the absolute amount of the drug), to what Tusko had received.
The elephants didn’t topple over dead. That was the good news. So what did they do? Many animals exhibit extremely unusual behavior under the influence of LSD. Spiders spin highly regular webs, goats walk around in predictable geometric patterns, and cats adopt a kangaroo-style posture in which they sprawl their legs and extend their claws and tail. The elephants, however, didn’t do anything so bizarre. At the low dose Siegel observed behavioral changes such as increased rocking and swaying, vocalizations such as squeaking and chirping, and head shaking. At the high dose, the elephants initially exhibited aggressive behavior before slowing down and becoming sluggish. The male gave himself an extended hay bath. Twenty-four hours later, both animals were back to normal.