"It was in Jonestown, a sick community claiming a utopian mantle in the wilds of Guyana, that 909 people drank cyanide-laced Kool-Aid on Nov. 18, 1978. This was, according to 'Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple,' airing tonight on WGBH, the largest mass murder-suicide in history."
Jim Jones called a meeting under the pavilion as night fell. It was announced as another "white night", the fake-suicide which had been rehearsed before. But this time, Dr. Laurence Schacht, Nurse Annie Moore, and others mixed cyanide and Valium into a metal vat full of grape Flavor Aid.
The community had practiced "revolutionary suicide," drinking from vats of Fla-Vor-Aid they had been told was laced with poison. This day, the vats contained Valium to render people unconscious and cyanide to kill them.
