Tusko the Elephant (Deleted Scene)

Hey everyone,
Been working on a video that's going to be a little more than twice as long as my normal videos. There was this one anecdote and shows the difficulty of trying to determine how to get an equivalent effect of some compound on different animals of different sizes. I cut it out because it didn't seem entirely relevant and was just belaboring a point I was making. I thought it was quite interesting so I'll share it with y'all:


"Pop quiz: If a safe dose of LSD for cats is one tenth of a milligram per kg body weight, what is an appropriate dose for Tusko, the 3000 kilogram elephant?

a) 2788 milligrams
b) 300 milligrams
c) 4mg
Many of you that participated in this poll chose (b), probably based on similar logic that the researchers that actually give this dose to the elephant used. In 1962, they wanted to see how elephants reacted to LSD, so based on dosing for cats, they calculated they should give 297mg of LSD to Tusko the elephant. He unfortunately suffered a lengthy seizure and ended up dying. Five minutes after being injected with 300 milligrams of LSD, “ [the elephant] trumpeted, collapsed, fell heavily onto his right side, defecated, and went into status epilepticus.”

This was a very quotable anecdote for anyone interested in painting LSD as a “dangerous” drug. However, 300 milligrams is actually a massive dose of LSD, because the experimenters made the mistake of scaling the cat dose linearly to come up with a dose for Tusko.

As Geoffrey West explains in his book “Scale,” metabolic rate plays an important role in determining doses and “dose-determining factor is to a significant degree constrained by the scaling of surface areas rather than the total volume or weight of an organism, and these scale nonlinearly with weight.” Simply put, you can’t just look at the difference in weights between two animals to determine an appropriate dose.

Observing Kleiber’s law and use of the ⅔ scaling rule would show that a more appropriate dose for elephants should be closer to a just few milligrams of LSD, nothing near the administered 297 milligrams.

On the other hand, Tusko was also pumped with a large dose of Thorazine and tranquilizer, so… did the LSD kill him or was it the Thorazine and tranquilizers or was it those things in conjunction that killed him?"