When Warren Thomas, the director of Lincoln Park Zoo in Oklahoma City, approached Tusko the elephant with a syringe full of LSD in 1962, he thought that he was about to make a major contribution to science.
Within a few moments of being injected, Tusko began trumpeting furiously, before keeling over as if he had been shot. An hour later, he was dead. “It appears that the elephant is highly sensitive to the effects of LSD,” Thomas and his colleagues concluded.
Some 35 years after his demise, Tusko’s role in the history of science has been recognised with first place in a list of the ten wackiest experiments of all time.
Read on, avid students of silliness. Read on! You can find the author’s website at museumofhoaxes.com.
An entire syringe full?!! It’s only supposed to take a drop! He could have fed Tusko (what moron named him that?) an LSD laced peanut or sugar cube. Yeah a couple of CCs of pure LSD would probably kill a sperm whale. What kind of a nut-job gets to be a zoo director, and conducts wacko drug experiments on their charges? I wonder if he had ties to the CIA? They were the only other’s “legally” experiment with the stuff, at that time. Or was it the Pentagon. I forget which.