A DOSE OF MADNESS

Forty Years Ago, Two Psychiatrists Adminstered History's Largest Dose Of
LSD. Johan Jensen Reports On The Epoch-Defining Experiment

Mystified by the new wonder drug LSD, the psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West
and his colleague at the University of Oklahoma, Chester M Pierce, were
looking for a new way to investigate the drug in 1962. They came up with an
idea so outlandish it could only happen in the world of experimental
psychology.

Male elephants are prone to bouts of madness; LSD seems to cause a
temporary form of madness; perhaps if we combine the two, they reasoned, we
could make an elephant go mad. Their research paper about this venture is a
tragicomedy of high hopes and lessons not learnt. For only mindless
optimism and blind faith can account for the events that unfolded on a hot
summer day in Oklahoma City's Lincoln Park Zoo 40 years ago.

Having established that "one of the strangest things about elephants is the
phenomenon of going 'on musth'," a form of madness that sees the animal
"run berserk for a period of about two weeks, during which time he may
attack or attempt to attack anything in his path," West and Pierce enrolled
the assistance of Warren D Thomas of the local zoo.

Thomas volunteered the services of Tusko, a 3,200kg, 14-year-old male
elephant. They were all set to establish what an elephant on acid would get
up to. One crucial point had to be decided - how much LSD would it take to
make him run amok? Research had established that lower animals are less
susceptible to the mind-altering effects of LSD than humans. It would be a
waste to have an elephant ready to go and then miss out on the unique
opportunity by giving it an insufficient dose.

West and Pierce decided to go for it. While 297mg might not sound a lot, it
is enough LSD to make nearly 3,000 people experience hours of "marked
mental disturbance," to use the researchers' phrase. This was the
record-breaking quantity of the most potent psychoactive substance in
existence fired into one of Tusko's rumps with a rifle-powered dart at 8am
on August 3. What happened next is captured with an oddly moving economy of
expression in the clinical voice of the research paper:

"His mate (Judy, a 15-year-old female) approached him and appeared to
attempt to support him. He began to sway, his hindquarters buckled, and it
became increasingly difficult for him to maintain himself upright. Five
minutes after the injection he trumpeted, collapsed, fell heavily on to his
right side, defecated, and went into status epilepticus." An hour and 40
minutes later, Tusko was declared dead. Surely a more anticlimactic moment
or a greater tragedy was never recorded by scientists.

The animal they had hoped would stomp around its pen in mad fury had fallen
to the ground and slowly expired in the dust. But they drew something
positive out of what in anyone else's view would be considered an abject
failure. West and Pierce's conclusion, a staggering feat of positive
thought, sums up an era's belief in the infallibility of science: "It
appears that the elephant is highly sensitive to the effects of LSD - a
finding which may prove to be valuable in elephant-control work in Africa."

* West, LJ, Pierce, CM, Thomas, WD (1962) Lysergic Acid Diethylamide: Its
effect on a Male Asiatic Elephant. Science, 138, 1100-1102