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I’ve heard the expression “someone’s been drinking/drank the cool aid” multiple times. I know coolaid is a drink or something but it doesn’t really make sense in the context. I feel like there’s some type of cultural reference here. Could someone explain what this means?

Fattie
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Nathan
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    There's a Wikipedia article: Drinking the Kool-Aid – wjandrea Apr 07 '20 at 13:24
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    Someone suggested an edit correcting the spelling of "Kool-aid". I rejected it because I believe the confusion comes from this: "Cool" and "aid" are both valid words, which is probably why the OP had never thought it was a brand. The phrase 'cool aid' just doesn't make sense. – Mohd Zulkanien Sarbini Apr 09 '20 at 03:01
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    @user178049 fair point, but there are three different spellings used in the whole question. Perhaps whoever edited the question wanted to simply make the spelling consistent? Subject: Kool-aid. First sentence: cool aid. Second sentence: coolaid ... – 0xC0000022L Apr 09 '20 at 08:19
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    @user178049 - While that may be a potential source of confusion, the fact that Kool-Aid is a brand name really isn't relevant to the question. The expression alludes to a specific historical event, in which Kool-Aid supposedly featured, but the idea that it was a Kool-Aid branded drink is entirely incidental. The key to understanding the expression is knowing about the event, not knowing the brand. – Dave Sherohman Apr 09 '20 at 09:23
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    @DaveSherohman I disagree. The fact that the "Kool-Aid" mentioned in the phrase that confused the OP is a brand name is crucial to the question. If you don't know that that mention in the phrase is a brand name, it's confusing as user178049 explains. "The key to understanding the expression is knowing about the event, not knowing the brand" -- but it was the brand name the OP heard. And because this event you mention is obscure, that is another source of confusion. – Rosie F Apr 09 '20 at 17:35
  • @RosieF - If they had supposedly consumed orange juice at Jonestown, the expression would the "drinking the orange juice". This would remove any confusion around the brand name, but it would do nothing to make the expression more understandable to someone unaware of the event. Thus, as I said earlier, knowing about the event is the key to the expression; the beverage consumed is incidental and has no significance other than as an allusion to the event itself. – Dave Sherohman Apr 10 '20 at 10:46

3 Answers3

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"Drinking the Kool-Aid" refers to the mass suicide of the "People's Temple" cult at Jonestown, Guyana in 1979. Hundreds of members of the cult are incorrectly believed to have killed themselves by drinking fruit-flavored punch laced with cyanide. Actually, the drink believed to be used was the brand Flavor Aid, NOT the brand Kool-Aid, but "drinking the Kool-Aid" became a saying that means slavish adherence to a delusional belief. This despite the fact that cult members were murdered after trying to escape, rather than slavish adherents. See the 4th Wikipedia paragraph for details.

SarahT
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    Yeah, sadly (for the people who make Kool-Aid), this was a case where being the more well-known brand worked against them. Really the phrase should be "drink the Flavor Aid", but who's heard of them? (Notably, the linked article contains twice as much text about the Jonestown massacre as it does about the product itself. Imagine if that was the only fact anyone knew about your product. How's that for a legacy?) – Darrel Hoffman Apr 07 '20 at 13:32
  • @DarrelHoffman I'm not sure that the association has had much negative impact on their sales. This can easily be a case of "no such thing as bad publicity" -- becoming a catch phrase keeps them in the public's mind. OTOH, Corona Beer is not doing well these days. – Barmar Apr 07 '20 at 15:21
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    @Nathan To add to this answer, the expression generally means, when said of someone, that they have so deeply bought into some type of propaganda or other questionable ideology or notion that they believe it deeply and without question, regardless of the evidence that may exist to discredit that view. – J... Apr 07 '20 at 18:35
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    To be honest, the fact that this has become a by-word for gullibility is a bit unfair to the victims of the slaughter. According to Wikipedia the adults who drank the poisoned Flavor-Aid were faced with armed guards who were prepared to shoot anyone who disobeyed. – EvilSnack Apr 07 '20 at 19:46
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    @EvilSnack - Yeah. Suicide at gunpoint != suicide. – Don Branson Apr 08 '20 at 21:26
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    The answer as posted is misleading: The members did in fact kill themselves by drinking cyanide-laced punch. – chrylis -cautiouslyoptimistic- Apr 08 '20 at 23:35
  • @EvilSnack: But why were they there in the first place? You know, if you jump off a cliff you will be faced with gravity that is prepared to drag you down, but you can't say it is not suicide... Same if someone tells you to trust him, blindfolds you, brings you to just before the cliff edge, tells you to walk straight, and you choose to follow. Likewise here, joining the cult was the suicidal move. Besides, as chrylis said, a large fraction of them did willingly drink the poison. – user21820 Apr 09 '20 at 04:39
  • It is certainly true that the people came willingly, because they were attracted to the overtly Marxist ideology of the People's Temple. But it stands to reason that at least some of them took the earlier suicide dry runs as propaganda of the death-before-dishonor variety, with no actual intent to carry it out for real. When they found themselves being tasked to kill themselves for real, with no reason to do so other than that the leader had demanded it, I daresay that if there had not been armed guards ready to shoot them, some would have refused. – EvilSnack Apr 10 '20 at 02:59
  • The linked article (a first-hand account) says With the camp surrounded by his armed guards, he told his followers to give “the medicine”—grape FlavorAid and Kool-Aid laced with cyanide and tranquilizers—to the children and the elderly first. – CJ Dennis Apr 10 '20 at 05:33
  • “Hundreds of members of the cult are incorrectly believed to have killed themselves by drinking flavored punch laced with cyanide.” No, that is completely true. However, the flavored punch was Flavor Aid brand, not Kool-Aid brand.  This looks to be grammatical error, possible due to edits— I've submitted an edit to fix factuality. – Slipp D. Thompson Apr 14 '20 at 06:53
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Sara T's explanation is often thought of as the origin, but the expression actually started getting used by "baby boomers" after Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test came out in 1968. The book chronicles the activities of Ken Kesey, one of the leaders of the hippie counterculture movement, and his followers, in particular their habit of getting together and taking LSD in order to have some sort of revelatory experience. (Electric Kool-Aid is Kool-Aid laced with LSD, and was popular at parties back in the day.)

From the linked article about the book:

The Acid Tests are parties where everyone takes LSD (which was often put into the Kool-Aid they served) and abandon the realities of the mundane world in search of a state of "intersubjectivity."

"Intersubjectivity" is achieved by subordinating one's subjective understanding of reality to a group-defined consensus of reality revealed by the "enhanced insight" that one derives from being high on LSD. (In the case of the book, it would seem that that "consensus reality" is pretty much what Ken Kesey says it is.)

The book was very popular in the hippie counterculture of the time, and people who were "into" that counterculture (including me, at least to some extent) were often said to have "drunk the Kool-Aid."

The definition got broader as time progressed, morphing into the more general meaning of "slavish adherence to a delusional belief" that Sarah describes, and given a push in that direction by the horrific event at Jonestown, and the similar Heaven's Gate incident.

(I sat around talking with some of the latter's recruiters for several hours over a couple of days when they visited my campus back in 1977, but I never drank the Kool-Aid.)

BobRodes
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    Interesting; do you have any references for the phrase pre-dating the mass suicide? – IMSoP Apr 07 '20 at 10:59
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    @IMSoP only the primary one of having used it myself, and having it be a fairly common term among my acquaintances. I haven't read the book, so there may be some in there in perhaps a more literal sense. – BobRodes Apr 07 '20 at 18:01
  • It would be interesting if the OED or similar has any early examples. I did a quick search on Google Books, but found nothing but a book catalogued under the wrong date. – IMSoP Apr 07 '20 at 18:16
  • Must admit I have always thought of 'drinking the kool aid' as 'becoming a merry prankster' or otherwise just 'getting turned on' – Frank Apr 07 '20 at 19:48
  • @IMSoP Yeah, it would. I did a bit more thorough search and came up with the same thing. Any references I found were at least probably literal. So, I don't find any secondary references either. Maybe I just have a creative memory. :) – BobRodes Apr 07 '20 at 20:41
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    FWIW - I lived through that era and never heard the expression "drink the Kool-Aid" or anything like it until after the People's Temple/Jonestown incident. – Bob Jarvis - Слава Україні Apr 07 '20 at 22:57
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    Google n-Gram viewer shows the first appearance of the phrase "drinking the Kool-Aid" in books only from about 1981, and then becoming more common from the end of the nineties: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=drinking+the+Kool-Aid&year_start=1960&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cdrinking%20the%20Kool%20-%20Aid%3B%2Cc0 So that does support that it became widespread at least only after Jonestown. – Michael MacAskill Apr 08 '20 at 00:06
  • It is just the title but Pubmed lists “ Psychol Today. 1977 Nov;11(6):92-94+. The CIA's electric kool-aid acid test.” – Stefan Apr 09 '20 at 09:02
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    I found the text: https://web.archive.org/web/20010804045822/http://www.frankolsonproject.org:80/Articles/PsychologyToday.html It predates Jonestown by a year. – Stefan Apr 09 '20 at 09:13
  • I wonder if the phrase was co-opted from this original meaning to a heavily negative one as part of the drug war (and general hatred of hippie kids by the established order). But it seems it might have been too obscure and both groups using the same phrase might have been coincidental entirely. – eps Apr 09 '20 at 14:04
  • @BobJarvis-ReinstateMonica Maybe you were hopelessly L-7, man. :) – BobRodes Apr 11 '20 at 07:47
  • @MichaelMacAskill I certainly don't dispute that it became more widespread after the Jonestown incident. – BobRodes Apr 11 '20 at 07:51
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Speaking strictly to the phrase, Electric Kool Aid, I must confess, as a child of the 70's, I had my share of the, Spanata Concoction, laced with whatever, Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, LSD, was available. Normally 50 tabs in a large jug of Spanata could revive a party that was about to end around 3:00- 4:00 am . Would be enough for 40 to 50 partiers.

Doc Wash
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    This isn't an answer. The OP doesn't mention "electric" or "Spanata concoction" anywhere (the latter turns up zero results in Google). What they are asking is the cultural meaning and background of "cool aid" [sic]. – Mari-Lou A Nov 18 '23 at 10:04