Last week, I worked on two slide decks about treatment of cyanide poisoning. Mainly, they were very clinical and all about smoke inhalation due to combustion of substances that release cyanide and the antidote that can be administered, which is a form of B12. I felt a bit like Agatha Christie when she worked in the hospital dispensary, learning about poisons so she could write about them in her mystery novels.
So I'm feeling a little clammy tonight, because I was flipping channels, and I caught the end of a documentary about Jonestown, Guyana, where 900 or so of the People's Temple cult members, some of them children, drank Kool-Aid mixed with cyanide. I had come across descriptions of this mass suicide in my reading while I was working on the slide decks last week. The descriptions were very dry and scientific and used the event as simply an example of how cyanide can be administered. It apparently has a very bitter taste in Kool-Aid.
The majority of the documentary was narrated by the handful of survivors, as well as ex-members. Every one of the narrators lost family in that mass suicide, and few could get through their narration without breaking down. One man recounted holding his dying wife in his arms while she held their dead baby son, who was foaming at the mouth. Hardly clinical.
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