Word: poison
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Then, exhorted by their leader, intimidated by armed guards and lulled with sedatives and painkillers, parents and nurses used syringes to squirt a concoction of potassium cyanide and potassium chloride onto the tongues of babies. The adults and older children picked up paper cups and sipped the same deadly poison sweetened by purple Kool...
They would convene in the central pavilion, and Jones would harangue them about "the beauty of dying." All would line up and be given a drink described as poison. They would take it, expecting to die. Then Jones would tell them the liquid was not poisonous; they had passed his "loyalty test." But if ever the colony were threatened from without, he told them, "revolutionary suicide" would be real and it would dramatize their dedication to their unique calling...
...cultists to kill themselves. But many, Rhodes reported, had taken their lives willingly. When Christine Miller challenged Jones' claim that "we've all got to kill ourselves," Rhodes said, "the crowd shouted her down." Many mothers, he added, voluntarily gave the cyanide to their children, then swallowed the poison themselves. Seated on the high wicker chair that served as his throne, Jones kept urging the crowd on, holding out the vision that all would "meet in another place." The scene quickly turned chaotic. Said Rhodes: "Babies were screaming, children were screaming, and there was mass confusion...
...Jones--more than 900 of them--downed those cups of cyanide-laced Flavor-aide and promptly died in the jungle of Guyana. In the 11 days since that terrifying event, those deaths (no one will ever really be sure whether they were all suicides, or whether some drank the poison at gunpoint) have stolen the world's attention away from less exotic, less titillating news. In short, the Jonestown affair has become the most publicized spot-news event since Richard Nixon's resignation, with every form of media jumping on each set of gruesome revelations and/or body counts, screaming them...
...unquestionably in poor taste. If you doubt that, take a quick look at the way Newsweek and Time featured bloated corpses and screaming headlines on their covers this week, or think about The Boston Globe's characteristically sensitive headlines and pictures last week ("They Lined Up to Take Poison," "The Babies Went First..."). America has become media saturated; the Jonestown affair simply gave that group another chance to strut its stuff...