"Drinking the Kool-Aid" is strongly believing in and accepting a deadly, deranged, or foolish ideology or concept based only upon the overpowering coaxing of another; the expression is also used to refer to a person who wrongly has faith in a possibly doomed or dangerous idea because of perceived potential high rewards.
While use of the phrase dates back to 1968 with the nonfiction book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,[citation needed] it is strongly associated with the events in Jonestown, Guyana, on November 18, 1978, in which over 900 members of the Peoples Temple movement died.
Jones proposed "revolutionary suicide" by way of ingesting a powdered drink mix made from Flavor Aid (later misidentified as Kool-Aid) that was lethally laced with cyanide and other drugs.
Film footage shot inside the compound prior to the events of November shows Jones opening a large chest in which boxes of Flavor Aid are visible.
[9] The phrase "drinking the Kool-Aid" as used to describe either unquestioning obedience or loyalty to a cause is considered offensive by some of the relatives of the dead and survivors who escaped Jonestown.
[13][14] The first known use of the phrase was in a passage from the 1968 non-fiction book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe, where it is used by Clair Brush, who works for the Los Angeles Free Press, to describe an unsuccessful attempt to stop someone with a poor mental health record from drinking Kool-Aid laced with LSD, who then subsequently had a bad psychedelic experience.
[16] The earliest such example she found, via a Lexis-Nexis search, was a 1982 statement from Lane Kirkland, then head of the AFL–CIO, which described Ronald Reagan's policies as "Jonestown economics," which "administers Kool-Aid to the poor, the deprived and the unemployed.
"[17] In 1984, a Reagan administration appointee, Clarence M. Pendleton Jr., chairman of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, was quoted as criticizing civil rights leaders Jesse Jackson, Vernon Jordan Jr., and Benjamin Hooks by making an analogy between allegiance to "the black leadership" and blind obedience to the Jonestown leaders: "We refuse to be led into another political Jonestown as we were led during the Presidential campaign.
A 2000 The New York Times article about the end of the dot-com bubble noted, "The saying around San Francisco Web shops these days, as companies run out of money, is 'Just keep drinking the Kool-Aid,' a tasteless reference to the Jonestown massacre."
In 2002, Arianna Huffington used the phrase "pass the Kool-Aid, pardner" in a column about an economic forum hosted by President George W.
"[24] In February 2012, "Drinking the Kool-Aid" won first place in an online poll by Forbes magazine as "the single most annoying example of business jargon.