Louis Jolyon West (October 6, 1924 – January 2, 1999) was an American psychiatrist involved in the public sphere, known mainly for his work/involvement with the MKUltra project, a CIA mind control project in the 1960s.
West's work on brainwashing techniques allowed him to exonerate U.S. servicemen under suspicion of treason for making false confessions during the Korean War era. This brought him to the attention of the CIA. He pioneered research into the use and abuse of LSD.
West was an officer in the United States Air Force Medical Service from 1948 to 1956, attaining the rank of major. While assigned to Lackland Air Force Base after his residency,[5] he was appointed to a panel to discover why 36 of 59 airmen captured in the Korean War had confessed or cooperated in North 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. He observed that "[i]t 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.[1]
He then published a paper with the title "United States Airforce prisoners of the Chinese Communist. Methods of forceful indoctrination: Observations and Interviews."[6]
Cornell University, where West completed his residency in psychiatry, was an MKUltra institution and the site of the Human Ecology Fund.[7][8] He later became a subcontractor for MKUltra subproject 43, a 20,800 USD 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".[9]
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 antipsychoticpromazine 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.[10] 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.[11][12] 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 (in milligrams per kilogram) 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.[13]
Following the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, Texas in 1963, his assassin Jack Ruby was held in an isolation cell in police custody. West was appointed as Ruby's psychiatrist, and pronounced him psychotic and delusional, and suggested further interrogation under the influence of sodium thiopental and hypnosis.[17][18]
Lance Rentzel
West disclosed his treatment of National Football Leagueflanker and University of Oklahoma alumnus Lance Rentzel after he was arrested twice (in 1966 and 1970) for indecent exposure to young girls in the epilogue of When All the Laughter Died in Sorrow, the athlete's 1972 memoir. (West's family had been acquainted with Rentzel's family during their time at the university.) Noting that "it is most unusual for a psychiatrist to permit his relationship with a patient to become public knowledge," West acknowledged that Rentzel "had many injuries, including a number of severe concussions," presaging contemporary medicine's greater understanding of chronic traumatic encephalopathy among American football players. He also asserted that he was "required to make periodic reports of [Rentzel's] progress to several public and private agencies."[19]
As a friend of Hugh Hefner, Rentzel went on to reside at the Playboy Mansion in the late 1970s. In his 2022 memoir, former Mansion butler Stefan Tetenbaum wrote that he saw Rentzel "[masturbate] in front of the primates" at the Mansion zoo and alleged that Hefner "thought Lance could be cured, by allowing him to be free to explore himself sexually [...] Lance constantly walked and ran about the Mansion grounds with his penis hanging out of his shorts [...] We were instructed not to pay attention to his public [masturbation]."[20] It is not known if Rentzel was domiciled at the Playboy Mansion through the intercession of West.
Patty Hearst trial
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, West wrote a newspaper article after the trial, asking President Carter to release Hearst from prison.[21] Some weeks after her arrest, Hearst repudiated her SLA allegiance.[22][23]
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.[24]
West participated in an American Psychiatric Associationpanel 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."[25]
"Pseudo-Identity and the Treatment of Personality Change in Victims of Captivity and Cults." In: Dissociation: Clinical and Theoretical Perspectives, with Steven Jay Lynn and Judith W. Rhue, eds. New York: Guilford Press (Aug. 1994). ISBN978-0898621860.
"Cults, Quacks and Non-professional Psychotherapies" (with M.T. Singer). In: Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, with H. Kaplan and B. Sadock. 3rd ed. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins (1980), pp. 3245–58.
