CIA’s Lost Magic Manual Resurfaces:
In the infamous Operation Midnight Climax, unwitting clients at CIA brothels in New York and San Francisco were slipped LSD and then monitored through one-way mirrors to see how they reacted. They even killed an elephant with LSD. Colleagues were also considered fair game for secret testing, to the point where a memo was issued instructing that the punch bowls at office Christmas parties were not to be spiked.
LSD Related Death of an Elephant:
In 1962, three men at the University of Oklahoma, lead by the idiosyncratic, CIA-collaborator Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West, injected LSD into an elephant for the first time. Their stated intent was to determine if LSD would induce “musth”, a naturally occurring condition in which elephants become violent and uncontrollable. After a series of events, the elephant died. There is some controversy and confusion surrounding the cause of death.
Louis Jolyon West … Louis Jolyon West. Oh, right: the genius who thought that Jonestown “wouldn’t have happened in California. But they lived in total alienation from the rest of the world in a jungle situation in a hostile country.” And then, a couple of decades later, Heaven’s Gate happened in California, so, “Oops.”
Dr West used the story of him killing the elephant to ingratiate him to members of the LSD-using subculture. In the early 1990s, West spoke at a DEA-sponsored LSD conference at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francsisco. At this lecture, West said “Back in the sixties, I wore a crew cut. I didn’t even have my beard yet, but I was already quite elephantine myself [he chortled while patting his large belly]. The hippies loved me, even though I had a crew cut. They loved me and trusted me after I told them that I was ‘the elephant killer’—the famous guy who had killed an elephant with LSD.” He showed photos of himself, standing with unkempt artists. He characterized the commune dwellers as having reverted to subsistence gardening because they were too brain damaged from LSD to participate in industrial life. He posed in one slide next to a skinny long-haired artist, proudly standing alongside an abstract psychedelic painting, and West gave commentary to the audience of law enforcement agents that the painting obviously showed the mental deterioration of the acidhead artist. (From an unpublished article by H Goldberg and several personal accounts of having spoken with him.)
