Louis Jolyon "Jolly" West was an American psychiatrist whose work focused particularly on cases where subjects were "taken to the limits of human experience". He performed a highly controversial psychiatric evaluation of Jack Ruby, and he was in charge of UCLA's department of psychiatry and the Neuropsychiatric Institute for 20 years. West was deeply involved in Korean War-era CIAbrainwashing experiments, the Agency's notorious MK-Ultra mind-control program, and the use and intentional abuse of LSD - even at one point killing an elephant with it. West was also active in studying the creation and management of cults, and anti-death penalty activism.
In the 1950s, West, then an Air Force doctor at Lackland Air Force Base, 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. Amid 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. He then published a paper with the title "United States Airforce prisoners of the Chinese Communist. Methods of forceful indoctrination: Observations and Interviews."
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 Suggestibility" with an accompanying document titled "Studies of Dissociative States".
LSD-related death of an elephant
One of the more unusual incidents in West's career took place in August 1962. He and two co-workers attempted to investigate the phenomenon of musth in elephants 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 was administered. Beginning twenty minutes later, West and his colleagues administered the antipsychotic promazine hydrochloride; they injected a total of 2800 mg over 11 minutes. This large promazine dose was not effective and may have contributed to the animal's death. It died an hour and 40 minutes after the LSD was given. Later, many theories developed about why Tusko had died. Some researchers thought 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, the drugs administered in an attempt to revive him 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 to that which had been given to Tusko, mixing the LSD in their drinking water rather than directly injecting it. Neither elephant expired or exhibited any great distress, although both behaved strangely for a number of hours.
During Patty Hearst's 1976 trial, West was appointed by the court in his capacity as a brainwashing expert and worked without fee. Believing that Hearst displayed all the classic signs of coercion, brainwashing, and the Stockholm effect, he wrote a newspaper after the trial article asking President Carter to release Hearst from prison. Some weeks after her arrest, Hearst repudiated her SLA allegiance.
Conflict with Scientologists
According to West, Scientologists attempted to discredit him and get him fired, using methods similar to those used in Operation Freakout. This was allegedly done after his contributions to a 1980 textbook that classified Scientology as a cult. West participated in an American Psychiatric Association panel on cults. Each speaker had received a letter threatening a lawsuit if Scientology were mentioned; apparently others were intimidated. Only West, the last speaker, referred to the letter and the cult:
"I read parts of the letter to the 1,000-plus psychiatrists and then told any Scientologists in the crowd to pay attention. I said I would like to advise my colleagues that I consider Scientology a cult and L. Ron Hubbard a quack and a fake. I wasn't about to let them intimidate me."
Personal life
In 1999, West died at his home in Los Angeles at age 74. His family said the cause of death was metastatic cancer. In 2009, West's son John wrote a book, "The Last Goodnights: Assisting My Parents With Their Suicides", in which he said he helped his father end his life at the latter's choice, when he was terminally ill with cancer, by using prescription medication.
