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What Happens When You Give L.S.D. to an Elephant?

Humans keep finding ways to justify giving drugs and alcohol to animals.

Credit...Illustration by Jeffrey Henson Scales, images by BirdHunter591 and SandraMatic/Getty Images Plus

Contributing Opinion Writer

I am not an angry person, normally, but then these days nothing is normal. I open the newspaper or turn on the television, thinking, Gee, I wonder what’s going on down in Washington. Next thing you know, my head is rolling around on my neck and green goop is coming out of my mouth, like Linda Blair in “The Exorcist.” Oh my God, I conclude. People are terrible.

And then there are reports of animals taking drugs: pigs drinking beer, lobsters smoking pot, elephants on L.S.D.

Consider, for instance, JoAnna Klein’s story last week about the octopods that scientists dosed with Ecstasy. Under the influence of the drug, more properly known as MDMA, the octopods seemed to chill. They spent more time hanging out with other octopods and showed off their mouths, in a gesture not unlike the one that Larger Pacific Striped Octopi use when they’re out together, you know, dancing beak-to-beak.

Up in Southwest Harbor, Me., a place called Charlotte’s Legendary Lobster Pound has been getting lobsters stoned on marijuana, using a system involving a chamber filled with water and pot smoke piped in through a tube.

According to Charlotte Gill, the owner, the lobsters thus sedated don’t kick so much when, a little later, they’re dropped into the, um, pot (and, according to Ms. Gill, so they don’t experience pain when they hit the boiling water).

The state’s health inspectors are not amused.

Ms. Gill has a license to grow marijuana, under Maine’s new law, but she says she has received word from the state that “it is supposed to be used only for myself and not for a lobster.”

My favorite part of this story is the detail that Ms. Gill’s 82-year-old father is eating “copious amounts of marijuana-sedated lobster every day.” I picture the gentleman wearing a relaxed grin, surrounded by a giant pile of lobster shells. “Mmm,” he says. “Butter.”

Is this helping? No? Well, how about this headline: “Australian Wild Pig Drinks 18 Beers, Gets in Fight With Cow.” The details of this story do not disappoint, although things in this tale don’t end well for the pig.

It is hard not to think wistfully of how things might have been different had the pig instead stolen some Ecstasy from a local octopus. Who knows? In that world, the cow and the pig and might have wound up as friends instead of turning to hooficuffs.

But all such stories pale in comparison with the legend of Tusko the elephant, who was given L.S.D. by researchers at the University of Oklahoma in 1962.

Some things to know about the Tusko story:

1. The name of the doctor performing the experiment was Louis West, but everyone called him Jolly.

2. Tusko is a common name given to elephants in captivity, including a pachyderm exhibited in 1922 as the “World’s Meanest.”

3. The Oklahoma Tusko was injected with the L.S.D. by way of a dart gun shot into his right buttock. This is, of course, the same method once used on Timothy Leary.

4. Five minutes after the injection, Tusko trumpeted, fell over and defecated.

5. After that, he went into a state the scientists later described as a “seizure”; his eyes closed and rolled back in his great big head.

6. In an effort to stop the seizure, Dr. West and company injected the elephant with both Thorazine and pentobarbital sodium. Tusko died an hour and 40 minutes later. There is some thought that it was these drugs, rather than the L.S.D., that killed the elephant.

7. In the wake of the tragedy, it was noted that the amount of L.S.D. given to the elephant was about 30 times the amount that would be administered to a human.

You’d think that the moral of this story would be fairly clear: Don’t give drugs to animals. Especially not elephants. And yet, 22 years later, a different scientist apparently reached a different conclusion, and repeated the experiment with two elephants. This time, both elephants survived. There is no word as to whether, in the aftermath, the elephants expressed an interest in jam bands.

I like the idea of tripping elephants, in the abstract, in the same way that I like the idea of octopods on Ecstasy, or lobsters on pot, or drunken Australian pigs picking fights with cows.

But the more I think about it, the sadder and angrier it makes me. Why do we have to mess with the brains of animals? Isn’t it enough to destroy our own minds without having to ruin the lives of elephants and octopods and lobsters?

It leaves me back where I started, with the conclusion that people are, at least sometimes, pretty terrible — to this world, to the animals we share it with and, of course, to one another. But then, watching the news and reading the paper every day, I knew that already.

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Jennifer Finney Boylan, a contributing opinion writer, is a professor of English at Barnard College and the author of the novel “Long Black Veil.” @JennyBoylan

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