Modern Era · South America · Politics
1978
Jonestown mass suicide
November 18, 1978
Nine hundred and nine members of Jim Jones's Peoples Temple drank cyanide-laced Flavor Aid in a Guyanese jungle compound. A third were children. A US congressman investigating the cult had been shot earlier that day on the airstrip. The phrase drink the Kool-Aid entered the language as shorthand for the abandonment of judgment.
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