Louis Jolyon West
| Louis Jolyon West | |
|---|---|
| Born |
October 6, 1924 Brooklyn, New York |
| Died | January 2, 1999 Los Angeles, California |
| Occupation | Psychiatrist |
Louis Jolyon "Jolly" West (October 6, 1924, in Brooklyn, New York – January 2, 1999, in Los Angeles, California) was an American psychiatrist whose work focused particularly on cases where subjects were "taken to the limits of human experience". He performed Jack Ruby's psychiatric evaluation, and he was in charge of UCLA's department of psychiatry and the Neuropsychiatric Institute for 20 years. He was also active in anti-death penalty activism. He was a long-time friend of Charlton Heston.
In the 1950s, West was appointed to a panel to discover why 36 of 59 airmen captured in the Korean War had confessed or co-operated in Korean allegations of war crimes committed by the United States. Amidst speculation that the airmen had been brainwashed or drugged, West came to a simpler conclusion: "What we found enabled us to rule out drugs, hypnosis or other mysterious trickery," he said. "It was just one device used to confuse, bewilder and torment our men until they were ready to confess to anything. That device was prolonged, chronic loss of sleep." The airmen avoided being court-martialed for these events as a result of West's research.
West did his psychiatry residency at Cornell University, an MKUltra institution and site of the Human Ecology Fund. He later became a subcontractor for MKUltra subproject 43, a $20,800 grant by the CIA while he was chairman of the department of Psychiatry at the University of Oklahoma. The proposal submitted by West was titled "Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestability” with an accompanying document titled “Studies of Dissociative States".
One of the more unusual incidents of West's career came in August 1962, when he and two co-workers attempted to investigate the phenomenon of musth by dosing Tusko, a bull elephant at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Oklahoma City, with LSD. They expected that the drug would trigger a state similar to musth; instead, the animal began to have seizures 5 minutes after LSD administration. Beginning twenty minutes after the LSD, West and his colleagues decided to administer the antipsychotic promazine hydrochloride and a total of 2800 mg was injected over 11 minutes. This large promazine dose was not effective and may even have contributed to the animal's death, which occurred an hour and 40 minutes after the LSD was given. Later, many had theories about why Tusko had died. One prominent theory was that West and his colleagues had made the mistake of scaling up the dose in proportion to the animal's body weight, rather than its brain weight, and without considering other factors, such as its metabolic rate. Another theory was that while the LSD had caused Tusko distress, it was the drugs administered in an attempt to revive him that actually caused death. Attempting to prove that the LSD alone had not been the cause of death, Ronald K. Siegel of UCLA repeated a variant of West's experiment on two elephants; he administered to two elephants equivalent doses (in milligrams per kilogram) to that which had been given to Tusko, mixing the LSD in their drinking water rather than directly injecting it as had been done with Tusko. Neither elephant expired or exhibited any great distress, although both behaved strangely for a number of hours.
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