Elephants on Acid (29 page)

The forest fire elicited more interest. Upon hearing the warning, most of the men stood up to scan the horizon, at which point they saw billowing clouds of smoke about three hundred yards away—produced, unbeknownst to them, by smoke bombs. Two men panicked at the sight of the smoke and took off, but the majority remained calm and set to work on the radio. They later explained that they figured they could run away if the fire got any closer.

The clear first place in the fear-arousal contest went to the misdirected artillery fire. Seconds after the men heard the first warning on the radio—
“Incoming artillery shells! Shells are landing outside the designated target area!”
—a shell burst nearby. The soldiers threw themselves down on the ground and pulled on their flak jackets. They screamed into the transmitter, only to realize it wasn’t working. A few continued to scream into it even after they knew it didn’t work. Almost half of them took off running when a few more shells exploded, flagrantly disregarding the voice on the radio ordering them to remain at their post and repair the transmitter.

The lesson learned from these experiments was clear: If your goal is to arouse maximum fear, then subtlety is not a virtue. Loud, exploding bombs work best.

However, the larger goal of the experiments was to observe what psychological features characterized those who performed well under stress, in the hope that others could be trained to behave the same way. Here the results were far more tentative. The authors noted that, generally speaking, the more field experience and education a soldier had, the cooler he stayed under stress. They also noted that every top performer displayed the ability to “lose himself” in whatever
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task he was doing. These men were able to tune out the threat by “reducing imagery content centering around fear of harm or of physical injury.”

Of course, those not in the military have slightly different priorities. Their goal is not to remain in position and continue to obey orders, but simply to survive. For which purpose, running at the first sign of radiation, forest fire, or incoming artillery shells, or screaming as a plane plunges to earth, still seem like compelling options.

October 31, 1938. 6:30 a.m. As John Deering walks to the room where he will be executed by firing squad, his face betrays no emotion. The sheriff reads the death warrant and Deering listens, casually sucking on a cigarette. The cigarette finished, he sits down in a chair positioned in front of the rock wall of the prison. A prison guard places a black hood over Deering’s head and pins a target to his chest. Then prison physician Dr. Stephen H. Besley steps forward and attaches electronic sensors to Deering’s wrists. Across the room, an electrocardiograph machine silently begins to record the hammering of the prisoner’s heart.

Deering was not a typical death-row prisoner. When police picked him up on August 1, 1938, and charged him with the murder of Utah businessman Oliver Meredith, Deering readily admitted to the crime. He explained that he shot Meredith in cold blood while stealing the man’s car. But Deering also expressed regret for what he had done and for the life he had led. He pleaded that the state kill him quickly “without all the red tape and rigamarole of courts.” He got his wish. Only three months elapsed between his arrest and execution.

During the final weeks of his life, Deering attempted to be a model citizen. He spoke out on the need to provide children with more opportunities. “Build more athletic fields and gymnasiums,” he wrote. “Give children more play facilities to keep their minds on wholesome activities. Give them the chance to develop that I never had.”

In a gesture of atonement, Deering also willed his body to the University of Utah medical school and arranged for his eyes, following his death, to be frozen and flown to San Francisco, where a surgeon would attempt to use them to restore sight to a blind person. Finally, at the request of Dr. Besley, he agreed to participate in an experiment—the first of its kind—to have his heartbeat recorded during his execution. Dr. Besley believed the experiment would, besides satisfying morbid curiosity, reveal valuable information about the effect of fear on the heart, and how soon death occurs after the heart is wounded.

On the day of his execution, Deering walked stoically to the firing squad as his fellow prisoners banged on the bars of their cells and howled maniacally. He sat down in the chair and allowed Dr. Besley to attach the electrodes to his wrists.

The electrocardiogram immediately disclosed that, though Deering’s face showed no emotion, his heart was beating like a jackhammer at 120 beats per minute, far higher than the resting average of 72 beats per minute.

The sheriff asked Deering whether he had any final words. His heartbeat momentarily fluttered higher. “I’d like to thank
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the warden for being so kind to me. Good-bye and good luck!” he replied. Then he murmured, “Okay, let it go.”

The sheriff gave the order to fire. Deering’s heartbeat raced up to 180 beats per minute. Then four bullets ripped into his chest, knocking him back into the chair. One bullet bore directly into the right side of his heart. For four seconds his heart spasmed. A moment later it spasmed again. Then the rhythm gradually declined until, 15.6 seconds after the first shot, Deering’s heart stopped.

Although his heart no longer beat, his breathing continued for almost a minute as he twisted and squirmed in the chair. Finally, 134.4 seconds after his heart had stopped, he was pronounced dead. The time was 6:48 a.m.

The next day the grim experiment made headlines around the nation, sharing space with the mass panic caused by Orson Welles’s Halloween-eve
War of the Worlds
radio broadcast. Dr. Besley offered the press a eulogy of sorts for Deering: “He put on a good front. The electrocardiograph film shows his bold demeanor hid the actual emotions pounding within him. He was scared to death.”

Thanks to Dr. Besley’s pioneering experiment, scientists can now say with certainty that the prospect of facing a firing squad causes a rapid heartbeat.

By the early 1960s the effects of LSD had been tested extensively. Cats, dogs, fish, mice, rats, baboons, chimpanzees, spiders, pigeons, and even, as we have seen, elephants, had all received the drug. It had been given to college students, prisoners, doctors, artists, government agents, soldiers, and tens of thousands of psychiatric patients. There weren’t many groups left to try it on. Then Dr. Eric Kast of Chicago’s Mount Sinai Hospital thought of what was, in hindsight, an obvious group. Not only might these people benefit from the drug, but they also didn’t have much left to lose. They were the terminally ill.

Kast had observed that his terminally ill patients often became preoccupied with their imminent deaths. At a time when, ideally, they should have been striving to experience the remainder of their lives to the fullest and savoring time with friends and family, they instead grew depressed and withdrawn. “Interference,” Kast wrote cautiously, “seems justified.”

So Kast designed an experiment to study the effects of LSD on dying patients. He had no illusion that LSD could offer a cure, and he made sure all the test subjects knew that. Instead, he was interested in how LSD would alter the experience of facing death. LSD was reported to produce in recipients a sense of harmony with the surrounding universe. Kast described this as a “happy, oceanic feeling.” Could LSD make the terminally ill more accepting of their fate and less fearful of approaching death?

Eighty patients took part in Kast’s study. All had life expectancies measured in mere weeks or months. Kast gave them each one hundred micrograms of LSD delivered hypodermically. He then observed the drug’s effects. If the subjects showed any sign of fear or disturbance—symptoms of a bad trip—he immediately administered an antipsychotic, chlorpromazine, that made them fall asleep. Most of the patients received the antipsychotic within eight to ten hours after being given the LSD. For the next three weeks, Kast interviewed and evaluated each patient daily. He paid careful attention to their moods, their attitudes toward life and death, and complaints of pain.

The results were encouraging. Of the eighty patients studied, seventy-two said they gained insight through the experience, fifty-eight found it pleasant, and sixty-eight (a full 85 percent) wanted to do it again.

The patients’ attitudes toward life also showed definite signs of improvement. Before, during, and after the test Kast asked the patients to indicate which of three statements best approximated their current state of mind: (1) “I want to die, life has nothing to offer me”; (2) “I like to live, but it does not mean anything to me”; or (3) “Life is great, the concept of death does not frighten me.” Before the test, most of them chose statement one; but while they were under the influence of LSD, number three became the favorite choice. Apparently, life seems great when you’re high on acid, even if you’re dying of cancer. Over the course of the following month, their moods evened out to number two.

The LSD did not directly block physical pain, but it did cause patients to focus less on their discomfort. Kast wrote that the drug seemed to reconcile them to their bodies. They felt the familiar aches and pains, but didn’t worry about them as much.

One curious, less anticipated effect that Kast observed was the emergence of a sense of community and camaraderie among the participants. They would nudge one another and say, “Have you tried it? What do you think?” They acted like members of a secret club—not only special and privileged, but also somewhat superior to those around them who did not “know” the experience. They had become the cool in-crowd on the terminal ward.

All in all, Kast gave LSD a ringing endorsement:

The results of this study seem to indicate that LSD is capable not only of improving the lot of pre-terminal patients by making them more responsive to their environment and family, but it also enhances their ability to appreciate the subtle and aesthetic nuances of experience. . . . Patients who had been listless and depressed were touched to tears by the discovery of a depth of feeling they had not thought themselves capable [of]. Although shortlived and transient, this happy state of affairs was a welcome change in their monotonous and isolated lives, and recollection of this experience days later often created similar elation.

Following Kast’s study, a number of researchers conducted similar experiments. The Los Angeles psychiatrist Sidney Cohen supplied the drug to a handful of terminally ill patients—including, it is rumored, the author Aldous Huxley. (Huxley definitely did receive LSD on his deathbed, administered by his wife, Laura. The last words he ever wrote, scrawled on a piece of paper, were, “Try LSD 100 mm [sic] intramuscular.” The only question is whether Cohen supplied the drug.) Walter Pahnke—famous for designing the so-called Miracle of Marsh Chapel experiment in 1962, in which he gave psilocybin to ten theology students as they participated in a Good Friday service—led a larger, more formal study of LSD and dying patients at Spring Grove State Hospital in Maryland during the late 1960s. Both Pahnke and Cohen reported results similar to those found by Kast.

However, funding for studies involving psychedelic drugs
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dried up during the 1970s and ’80s. Only recently have physicians begun actively lobbying to be able to pursue this line of research again, so they might be able to prescribe drugs such as LSD to the terminally ill.

In the meantime, medical workers interested in altering and improving the experience of dying have been searching for methods that do not involve the use of controlled substances. A practice called music thanatology—which involves playing music for dying people—has gained support. Popular deathbed musical choices include Gregorian chants or harp playing.

Music thanatology and LSD seem like naturally complementary forms of therapy, and maybe, if LSD is ever legalized again, their joint effects could be studied. Though the harp playing may have to go—a little Grateful Dead might be more appropriate.

A man lies dying. He is motionless except for the twitching of a muscle in his face. A low rattle of phlegm accompanies each inhalation of breath. The bed he is lying on rests, in turn, on the large pan of a platform beam scale. Two doctors watch every quiver of the beam. Suddenly the whistling of the man’s breath stops. The doctors look up from the scale and then glance at each other. “Is he dead?” one of the men whispers. As if in affirmation, the beam of the scale hits the lower bar with a distinct clang.

We speak metaphorically of people having a heavy soul, weighed down by grief or by the burden of years. Duncan MacDougall, a doctor who worked in Haverhill, Massachusetts, at the beginning of the twentieth century, took such talk literally. He reasoned that if there is such a thing as a soul, it must have a material basis. And if it has a material basis, then it must have weight. And if it has weight, then he should be able to weigh it.

But how exactly do you weigh a soul? MacDougall proposed a straightforward solution: Place a dying man on a scale and weigh him before and after death. Any unexplained difference between the two measurements would be, QED, the weight of the soul that had departed the body.

In 1900 MacDougall approached physicians at the nearby Cullis Free Home for Consumptives with his plan, and they gave him permission to conduct his experiment at their institution. All he had to do was wait for a patient to die.

Soon the doctors notified MacDougall that a tuberculosis patient was approaching his final hours. They moved the dying man’s bed, with him in it, onto a Fairbanks scale, designed to weigh silk but adapted for its new purpose. Eagerly MacDougall calibrated the weights—accurate to one-tenth of an ounce. And then he waited. Occasionally he checked the patient. He listened for a heartbeat. He took the man’s pulse. But the patient was in no hurry to die. As the time passed MacDougall kept a constant record of the scale’s measurement, and discovered the man was losing weight at the rate of one ounce per hour.