On November 18, 1978, more than 900 Americans died in the jungle in Guyana after drinking a cyanide-laced fruit drink at the behest of their leader, the Reverend Jim Jones. It is one of the largest mass death events in American history, and has become so ingrained in popular culture that “drinking the Kool-Aid” has become an idiom for belief in any dangerous ideology. In a new documentary about that fateful day, Cult Massacre: One Day in Jonestown, Jones’s son Stephan Jones argues that the phrase shifts the blame away from where it truly belongs. “That night was murder,” he says.
