Jim Jones made his definitive move to Guyana on June 17, 1977 as stated by the document above. He arrived at the Timehri International Airport (now the Cheddi Jagan International Airport) at 11:35pm. He most probably went straight to Georgetown (47 minutes drive from the airport) where he spent the night. There’s no exact date about his move to Jonestown itself but I doubt he stayed in Georgetown for long so he probably left for Jonestown on June 18 or 19.
The main book to read is The Road to Jonestown by Jeff Guinn, probably the only book that isn’t biased in any way or form. Otherwise, others great books are Raven by Tim Reiterman ( a little outdated but still a great read), The Broken God by Bonnie Thielmann (good little book about his time in Brazil), Jonestown Survivor: An Insider’s Look by Laura Johnston Kohl (interesting but short inside look into Peoples Temple and Jonestown), Hearing the Voices of Jonestown by Mary McCormick Maaga (truly great book about the women from Peoples Temple, with interesting insights about their power and relation to Jim), The Cult That Died: The Tragedy of Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple by George Klineman (also outdated but still contain some great information) and Black and White by Shiva Naipaul (great book showing the complexity of Jonestown, the good and the bad, and also tearing apart Deborah Layton’s lies).
Before starting abusing drugs in 1971, he mostly took medication to treat his known ailments, even though it is also known he was already using prescription drugs like Darvon for migraines. Even then, he often took more than the recommended dosage.
His known medication before 1971 was Insulin for his diabetes (diagnosed in 1954, along with high blood pressure), and Nitroglycerin for his heart.
Sometime around 1971, he started to heavily abuse drugs like Amphetamines, Quaaludes, and later liquid Valium and Morphine, Pentorbarbital, Percodan, Oxycodone, …That same year he also started wearing sunglasses at times, his drugs use being one of the reasons.
He often mixed his pills with alcohol, generally Vodka, Whiskey or Cognac, an habit he kept up until the end in Jonestown.
There are reports he was using cocaine and heroin at some point, but there are no other details about it, beside the testimony of Neva Sly Hargrave and Tim Carter (who mentioned only Heroin).
The drug he certainly abused the most though was Amphetamines (not to be confused with Methamphetamine). He took it to stay awake, often working 20-hour days or even more, and get up in the morning. His known paranoia was then fueled even more by the drug intake. People in the congregation had no idea of his addiction and the majority thought the short and long time side effects of the drug were due to some chronic illness. Among the side effects he experienced : quicker reaction time, feeling of energy, chronic trouble sleeping, dry mouth, headache, hostility, severe anxiety, increased heart rate, hypertension, paranoia, violent behavior, convulsions, loss of coordination, obsessive behavior.
A side effect he did not seem to experience with Amphetamine abuse was loss of appetite. Amphetamines can be used as appetite suppressants and in diet pills, but he often talked about food and how he had to try to resist it. In 1972 he made a few references to fasting to lose some weight quickly, and in 1974, he said he can get into a “food problem” because it keeps his mind from thinking. Food was mentioned by Stephan as another addiction for his father, just like drugs.
Quaaludes and Pentorbarbital were used to sleep at night. If he doubled the dosage of Amphetamine, he actually tripled the recommended dosage to sleep. At high doses Pentorbarbital can cause mental confusion, irritability, paranoid or suicidal ideation and impair judgment, and coordination.
Once in Jonestown he relied more and more on Valium for his anxiety. In February 1978, he was prescribed antibiotics for his cough (which later resulted in a lung infection),Terramycin, Erythromycin and Ampicillin. As with all medications, he also abused them, and natural defenses can be affected by their excessive use. Around September 1978, he started using Elavil and Placidyl for depression, both by injection.
At the time of his death, a lethal dose of Pentorbarbital was found in his body as shown in the toxicology report from his autopsy:
The Cult That Died by George Klineman:
Jim occasionally suffered a condition speed freak call being “over amped.” Sounds would be exaggerated; a car’s horn was enough to drive him up the walls. He would get wild-eyes and threaten to attack people who annoyed him, but guards always held him back before he did any harm. One time at the Temple in Los Angeles, Jim Jones had taken a bunch of pills — he selected them by color — and the locomotive inside him had built up such a head of steam, the boiler was ready to explode. He had to walk off all that energy. Jones and others walked out a side door on to South Alvarado Street. Father was rushing and everyone in his group had to walk faster than normal, to keep up with him. Suddenly he stopped. He turned around and push the guards away.
“Are you alright, Father?”
“Did you hear that?”
”Hear what?”
“Did you hear the baby frog croaking?”
Raven by Tim Reiterman :
“Marceline became concerned about this new source of friction and psychological problems. It came to a head once when she grabbed the stash from his medicine chest and, while Jones struggled with her, flushed his drugs down the toilet.”
Jim Jones Jr. :
“Once after I went to Georgetown I had to come back with somebody from the Guyanese government who wanted to do an inspection [of Jonestown], and also talk to Jim. We get there, and no Jim. I go to his cottage, and he’s lying there passed out from drugs. So here I am, dragging my father into the shower and standing in there with him, trying to get him in shape to go out and talk to the guest.”
I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure as the first autopsy wasn’t made thoroughly and the second happened a month after his death. Officials are more inclined to say suicide but they never excluded murder either, and on December 22, 1978, coroner’s jury ruled it was murder. I’d say it could have gone either way. He was right-handed and the entry-wound is on his left temple, but I won’t exclude the possibility that he was ambidextrous, as after examining pictures and various footages he also seemed to use his left-hand a lot. My theory is that he either shot himself, which would make more sense as I can’t really picture him having somebody else do it for him. Other possibility would be that Annie Moore did it for him as she was close to him and was his personal nurse.
This post is only speculative as you can’t diagnose someone post-mortem.
From nimh.nih.gov : Borderline personality disorder is a mental illness marked by an ongoing pattern of varying moods, self-image, and behavior. These symptoms often result in impulsive actions and problems in relationships. People with borderline personality disorder may experience intense episodes of anger, depression, and anxiety that can last from a few hours to days.
Symptoms fitting Jim’s behavior:
An intense fear of abandonment, even going to extreme measures to avoid real or imagined separation or rejection: That’s basically the core of his relationship with Marceline, looking up to her and seeing her as a mother figure, then threatening her and the children when she wanted to leave him. Same for Peoples Temple members, threatening them or begging them when they wanted to leave the Temple. From Raven : “He not only kept seeing Carolyn as a mistress; he chipped away at Marceline’s standing, alternately praising her and running her down in front of the children and church members. In his frustration and guilt over his affair, he would throw angry fits and become so hostile that she threatened again to leave; then he would beg her to stay, telling her she was the only one he loved. Sometimes he threatened to harm her and the children if they deserted him.”
Impulsive and often dangerous behaviors, such as spending sprees, unsafe sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, and binge eating : We can check everything but spending sprees and maybe reckless driving (even though his drugs and alcohol abuse + his love of driving can’t be a good combination). If you listen to some of his sermons, he talked about the eating part a few times. “He begins taking amphetamines (in 1971) so that he can stay awake longer. He’s working 20-hour days, even more sometimes. And then because the paranoia is set off by that drug because they make you so edgy, he has to start taking pills so he can go to sleep. And he’s a man of excess. He’ll take double the dosage to get up and he’ll take triple the dosage to sleep to the point where sometimes he starts nodding out. And any drug addict – and Jones was a drug addict – will develop even more acute paranoia.” – Jeff Guinn
Recurring thoughts of suicidal behaviors or threats : Thoughts of suicides started quite early in his childhood to continue later in life.
Intense and highly changeable moods, with each episode lasting from a few hours to a few days : Happened quite often, hard to pinpoint to a specific example though.
Chronic feelings of emptiness : “He was into power, sex, food, drugs. Whatever he needed to fill that hole, he was using it.” – Stephan Jones
Inappropriate, intense anger, such as frequently losing your temper, being sarcastic or bitter, or having physical fights : There’s a few examples out there about episodes of intense anger close to going physical toward some members, only stopped by his guards restraining him.
Periods of stress-related paranoia and loss of contact with reality, lasting from a few minutes to a few hours + Difficulty trusting, which is sometimes accompanied by irrational fear of other people’s intentions : Again, hard to pinpoint to a specific example, but something recurring would be him being persuaded that people, more often than not his own, wanted to see him dead. From Snake Dance by Laurie Efrein Kahalas, example of an extreme reaction over a non-threatening note slipped under his door :
Suicide was on his mind a lot even though he publicly stood against it, as shown during the anti-suicide rally on the Golden Gate Bridge, on May 30,1977, “The suicide is the victim of conditions which we cannot tolerate, and, and….I guess that was Freudian because I meant to say, ‘which he cannot tolerate,’ which overwhelm him, for which there is no recourse. I have been in a suicidal mood myself today for perhaps the first time in my life, so I have personal empathy for what we are doing here today.”
He also told his followers that he was against suicide for selfish reason, claiming that “anyone doing so will go back 500 generations and 10,000 years”.
He was certainly more open and honest about his suicidal thoughts in the last year of his life. From a May 1978 tape : “Ever since, as a child, I saw a dog die, I wanted to commit suicide. It was the first time I felt guilt. I had some cats and dogs and I had to care for them. Just little animals I stayed alive for because I didn’t know who was going to feed them. I was too young to know how to kill them. Then a little later my mother needed me, and then some poor soul down the street. Then the black people wanted me for their champion. It’s always been that way.”
From a biographical tape made sometime in September 1977 :
“Rosenbergs… I was in a coma when the Rosenbergs were being executed. I was ready to die. Infectious hepatitis. My mind was so dim… It was in the summer. Marcie was standing behind a screened partition. Jesus Christ, I kept thinking, “They can’t kill these people, they can’t kill these people.” I’d marched till there were holes in my shoes trying to get petitions. The fucking Pope, we even got the Pope. And their children came up and kissed them through the screen. Oh God, I just died a thousand deaths. I wish I could’ve died then. Hell you can only have so many revolutionary deaths– you care for people, you die, you die. So hell, death isn’t any problem for me anymore. I was in this goddamn miserable coma. I’d drift in and out, and looked up at the clock as it ticked away.
“Say, Marcie, are the Rosenbergs dead yet, are they dead yet?”
“No, dear, not yet…”
And I’d drift back… I got so weak. And then, I came out of the last coma, and they’d been executed. I really don’t understand why I lived. I really don’t honestly know why I lived. I thought, “It’s futile.” An inhumane system that kills people based on a bunch of scrap paper. Just because they had Communist affiliations. No more had given atomic “secrets” than I had. I hated that system. I wept when I got out of that coma. I wished I had died. I wept till those goddamn sheets were just soaked. So someplace along the line I quit crying. Don’t cry anymore.”
I won’t go into the revolutionary suicide thing, but that idea started sometime around 1973, following the Kinsolving short lived series of articles, and the first official test in 1975 when he made a few of the PC members drink “poisoned” wine. The subject was brought up more often since then.
I don’t believe he was evil. He was never officially diagnosed but there’s little doubt he was mentally ill. He had a real fear of abandon since he was a kid and was lonely with absentee parents, lack of actual friends. His only real and meaningful relationship with was his neighbor, Mrs. Kennedy. He also grow up with this sense of paranoia and future greatness, both constantly fueled by his mother when she was around, “he had a mother who believed that she was reincarnated through many lives and that in a vision it was revealed to her that she would give birth to the greatest man who ever lived. So here he’s hearing from the time he can understand words, you are something special. You have special powers. Then his mother would constantly harp about all the outsiders who are against them, who are holding her down, who are holding their family down.“ (Jeff Guinn, author of The Road to Jonestown).
He spent his adult life creating this environment where he was surrounded by people devoting their life to him, and as Jim Jr. pointed out, he saw people leaving him as betrayal. Drugs addiction, sex, food, endless adulation comes with it, trying to fill that hole by all means necessary. He had low self-esteem, an inferiority complex, he was insecure, and was extremely self-destructive, suicidal, and on his way destroyed the lives of his followers as well.
From Raven by Tim Reiterman : “Negativism and undercurrents of paranoia swept him. Former friend, Rev. Wilson, a survivor of the Battle of the Bulge, recognized the pattern of fear. No single phobia, no single set of circumstances, provoked Jim’s overreactions. Incapable of identifying his enemy, Jones was equally incapable of surmounting it. The fears lingered or returned quickly, assaulting him again and again. He submitted to them—and they became a part of him, like a chronic injury. When he could not shake them, he used them to his advantage or tried to get others to share them, so he would not face them alone, so others would not think him cowardly or excessively fearful—or mentally ill.”
So no, he wasn’t evil, but paranoia + drugs addiction + need for adulation + suicide ideas equal a very bad combination leading to a destructive ending.
James Warren Jones 