In 1962, an elephant was given the largest LSD dose ever recorded, he died 100 minutes later

An elephant in musthPhoto: Canva In the annals of controversial scientific experiments, few stories are as disturbing as that of Tusko, a 14-year-old Indian elephant at the Oklahoma City Zoo. On August 3, 1962, Tusko became the subject of an experiment that would go down in history as one of the most infamous animal studies ever conducted. He was injected with 297 milligrams of LSD, almost 3,000 times the normal human recreational dose, and remains the living being to have received the largest single dose of the hallucinogenic drug ever administered, according to the Guinness World Records.The experimentThe experiment was carried out by two psychiatrists, Dr Louis Jolyon West and Dr Chester M. Pierce, along with the zoo’s director, Warren Thomas. Dr West was, put simply, a deeply controversial figure. He was a documented experimenter in Project MKUltra, an illegal human experimentation programme designed by the CIA to identify methods of brainwashing, psychologically torturing, and forcing confessions from people during interrogations.These methods included sensory deprivation, hypnosis, isolation, abuse, the covert administration of psychoactive drugs, and various other forms of t...