Louis Jolyon "Jolly" West (October 6, 1924 – January 2, 1999) was an American psychiatrist who was a longtime consultant and contractor for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
West worked in the United States Air Force as a medical officer. He pioneered research into brainwashing techniques employed against American prisoners of war (POWs) by their captors. His research exonerated 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. West became involved in research into the use and abuse of LSD and other drugs, becoming a contractor for MKUltra, a CIA mind control project in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1954, at the age of 29, West became a full professor and chair of psychiatry at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine. In 1967, West operated in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district to conduct research into the hippie movement there. From 1969 to 1989, West served as chair of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine and director of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute.
West frequently worked as a court-appointed psychiatrist and examined Jack Ruby and Patricia Hearst during their trials. West was also active in studying the creation and management of cults and anti-death penalty activism. He was a supporter of the Civil Rights Movement and participated in sit-ins and rallies. He made several trips to South Africa, where he testified on behalf of black prisoners during the attempt to end apartheid. West was a trustee of the American Psychiatric Association and served as a consultant to a variety of governmental organizations, including the United States Air Force, the Peace Corps and the United States Information Agency.
Early life West was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant father and a mother who taught piano. He grew up in poverty in Madison, Wisconsin, and was a graduate of Madison East High School. He subsequently attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison for a year and, after completing prerequisite coursework at the University of Iowa under the aegis of the Army Specialized Training Program during World War II, earned his M.D. from the University of Minnesota Medical School in 1949. Thereafter, he completed his residency at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic of Cornell University on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in 1952.
Air Force
Korean War POWs and brainwashing West was an officer in the United States Air Force Medical Service from 1948 to 1956, attaining the rank of major. After completing his residency, he was assigned as Chief of Psychiatric Service at the 3700th USAF Hospital at the Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. At Lackland 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.
He then published a paper with the title "United States Airforce prisoners of the Chinese Communist. Methods of forceful indoctrination: Observations and Interviews."Ross, Colin A. (2006). The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists. Richardson, TX: Manitou Communications (2006). p. 31. . Original title: BLUEBIRD: Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrist (2000).
Jimmy Shaver In 1954, West testified in the trial of airman Jimmy Shaver, who was executed for the murder of Chere Jo Horton. West was ordered to conduct the psychiatric evaluation of Shaver. West hypnotized Shaver and injected him with sodium pentothal in an attempt to remove his amnesia. While Shaver was under hypnosis, he confessed to killing the young girl. At trial, he maintained his innocence. West argued that Shaver suffered temporary insanity on the night of Chere Jo Horton's killing.
University of Oklahoma In 1954, at the age of 29 and with no previous post-residency fellowship or tenure-track appointment, West became a full professor and chair of psychiatry at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine. Along with friend Charlton Heston, he supported the Civil Rights Movement, frequently participating in sit-ins and rallies in Oklahoma City. West commuted between Lackland AFB and Oklahoma City until he was discharged in July 1956, at which time he became OU's full-time chief of psychiatry.
Project MKUltra
Cornell University, where West completed his residency in psychiatry, was an MKUltra institution and the site of the Human Ecology Fund. West's success with POWs brought him to the attention of the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA's Technical Services Staff Chemical Division head Sidney Gottlieb, whose code-name for the operation was Sherman Gifford, acted as West's handler. In a letter to Gottlieb dated June 11, 1953, two months after MKUltra started, West outlined the experiments he proposed to perform using a combination of psychotropic drugs and hypnosis. He became a contractor 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 (OU). For his role, he received TOP SECRET security clearance from the CIA. The proposal submitted by West in 1956 was titled "Psychophysiological Studies of Hypnosis and Suggestibility" with an accompanying document titled "Studies of Dissociative States".Ross, Colin A. (2006). The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists. Richardson, TX: Manitou Communications (2006). . Original title: BLUEBIRD: Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrist (2000). In it, West claimed to have discovered a way to replace "true memories" with "false ones" in human beings without their knowledge through the use of hypnotic suggestion. He wrote that his discovery was the result of "new drugs" which, when administered, accelerated a hypnotic state and deepened a trance.
While at Oklahoma, West received funds from the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research, which he called "a non-profit private research foundation", but which was actually a shell organization run by Georgetown pathologist Charles Freeman Geschickter to funnel funds for CIA behavioral research.
In August 1977, The New York Times revealed that West was one of the researchers involved in behavior experiments for the CIA. In September 1977, OU president Paul F. Sharp announced he was notified by the CIA that OU was one of 80 institutions that unknowingly conducted LSD research. West commented that his research had been confined to animals, and that he was unaware that the research funds came from the CIA. He also said others at OU were doing research on LSD at the time.
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.Schmidt-Nielsen, K. (1972) How Animals Work, pp. 86-89. Cambridge University Press. 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.
1967 San Francisco "crash pad" After completing a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California while on leave from Oklahoma during the 1966–1967 academic year, West "led a group of researchers to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, where they rented an apartment and studied the hippie culture" during the latter half of 1967 under a contract with the Foundations Fund for Research in Psychiatry, Inc. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa psychologist Anthony J. Marsella has alleged that the Foundations Fund was employed as a CIA funding conduit during the Vietnam War.
Jack Ruby Following the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, Texas in 1963, his killer, 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. West stated that Ruby had developed an acute psychotic state which had gotten worse and would continue to do so. He therefore suggested that Ruby be removed from jail and hospitalised. He claimed that this was "precipitated by the stress of [his] trial". West helped convince the court that Ruby should not be sentenced to death. West had become a vocal critic of the death penalty after witnessing a gruesome execution in Wisconsin. For years, he led a movement of doctors against the death penalty.
Lance Rentzel West disclosed his treatment of National Football League flanker 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."
UCLA From 1969 to 1989, West served as chair of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine and director of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. He was recruited to UCLA by dean Sherman Mellinkoff.