Largest LSD dose ever killed an Indian elephant in 1962

Tusko, a 14-year-old Indian elephant at the Oklahoma City Zoo, died 100 minutes after being injected with 297 mg of LSD on August 3, 1962. The dose was nearly 3,000 times a typical human recreational dose and remains the largest single dose of the drug ever recorded, according to Guinness World Records.

The experiment was conducted by psychiatrists Louis Jolyon West and Chester M. Pierce, along with zoo director Warren Thomas. West was a documented researcher in the CIA's Project MKUltra, an illegal human experimentation programme. The team aimed to induce musth, an aggressive hormonal state in bull elephants. Five minutes after the injection, Tusko trumpeted, collapsed, had a seizure, and could not be revived with antipsychotic drugs.

Some researchers later argued that the fatal mistake was scaling the dose to the elephant's body weight rather than brain weight, or that the combination of drugs given during the seizure caused death. A 1980 replication by UCLA psychopharmacologist Ronald K. Siegel gave two elephants equivalent doses of LSD mixed in drinking water; both survived unharmed. West later served as psychiatrist to Jack Ruby, and Pierce became founding president of the Black Psychiatrists of America.