Three men hold their breath. It was 8 a.m. on August 3, 1962 when they burst into the enclosure of Tusko, an old resident weighing a few tons at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Oklahoma City (Oklahoma). Courted by visitors and adored by children, this Asian elephant has for years been the pride of the animal park and its director, Warren D. Thomas. And yet, it is the latter who is holding a rifle.
What happens when you give psychotropic drugs to an elephant? For obvious reasons, science has never asked the question. Until that day in the summer of 1962, when Warren Thomas discharged his gun at Tusko, a 14-year-old male elephant. Inside the rifle, a hypodermic syringe containing 297 milligrams of lysergic acid diethylamide, better known by the acronym LSD, which represents approximately 3,000 times the usual dose for a human.
The objective of the “experiment”: to see if the ingestion of LSD – this powerful hallucinogenic drug – can cause in the three-ton animal a response similar to that observed in male elephants in the wild, namely a sudden increase in testosterone production associated with strong aggression. Certainly linked to reproduction, this mechanism called “musth” has been observed several times in nature. Zoo management and two researchers from the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine want to know if it is possible to reproduce it artificially.
Psychotro(m)pes
In Tusko’s case, however, the experiment was a heartbreaking failure: the elephant on acid did not show the slightest aggression. After receiving his dose (the largest amount of LSD ever administered in history to date, and fortunately), he trumpeted violently before collapsing in a corner of his enclosure, his breathing labored. After about twenty minutes of convulsions, his condition not changing, the scientists injected him with a sedative, distributed once again in pachydermic proportions. Without success: an hour and forty minutes after the start of the experiment, Tusko, “the jewel of the Oklahoma City Zoo,” was dead.
Why did the animal experience such bad trip? The experimenters are doubtful. In December 1962, in the columns of the very serious journal Science, they simply concluded: “It appears that the elephant is very sensitive to the effects of LSD.” Certainly. But this was not enough to extinguish the controversy: the next day, accusatory headlines spread in the American press, accusing the researchers of negligence and cruelty. What, after all, made them give a peaceful elephant a psychotropic drug?
“If it can kill an elephant, it might kill these idiots.”
We might be surprised at the researchers’ enthusiasm for LSD, but you should know that at the time, the drug electrified the scientific community. Since its discoverer, the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann (1906-2008), experienced his first hallucinatory trip in his lab in 1943, we have imagined that LSD could treat schizophrenia, depression, addiction… The intelligence services are also interested in it. For example, with its secret and illegal MK-Ultra program, the CIA experimented with the hallucinogenic compound as a truth serum and tool of mental manipulation in the midst of the Cold War.
Additionally, LSD is not yet illegal in the United States. But since it fuels the protest counterculture of the 1960s, the failed experiment will be one more pretext for the government to ban it. “One could say that Tusko died on the altar of science, (…) for having warned of the dangers of this drug for humans”noted a journalist from the Canadian daily Calgary Herald, in December 1962. “LSD is used by irresponsible people to cause fleeting illusions and very vivid visual hallucinations. If it can kill an elephant, it might kill these idiots.”adds a colleague from the American newspaper The Spokesman-Review, in January 1963.
Double standards… Especially since the two researchers from the University of Oklahoma who supervised the experiment, Louis Jolyon West – a long-time CIA collaborator – and Chester M. Pierce, made no secret of having already tested the psychotropic drug on their own bodies!
And the matter was not going to end there. In 1984, the American psychologist Ronald K. Siegel reproduced the experiment with two other pachyderms. But this time, instead of injecting them with the dose, he adds the drug to the water from which his guinea pigs drink. Miracle: no overdose to deplore! Their only symptoms are a swinging movement from left to right, some high-pitched trumpeting, then they return to their normal state in less than twenty-four hours. Ronald K. Siegel therefore proved that the largest land mammal could be made to hover. A big step for science.
