The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple

by Jeff Guinn

After being gassed in World War I, James Thurman Jones, “Big Jim,” never passed a comfortable day, and deflected his physical and mental distress with pills supplied to him during treatments at regional VA hospitals. Almost forty years later, Jim Jones emulated his dad. As far back as 1965, Garry Lambrev remembers Jones occasionally pausing in mid-sermon to complain about his need to use pain medication. Jones said that he didn’t like doing it, but sometimes needed the pills to alleviate discomfort from various unspecified ailments. Temple membership was then less than a hundred and most had come west from Indiana with Jones. They knew him well and harbored no belief that he was a god above the human need for occasional self-medication. As the Temple grew, Jones’s references to personal use of pain pills stopped. Whether he’d actually discontinued them or not, his expanding ranks of more worshipful members couldn’t be allowed to think that Father needed drugs to function, especially since he forbade them to his followers. It would have been a contradiction that even Jones couldn’t explain away. But sometime around 1971 he began abusing drugs on a regular basis—amphetamines and tranquilizers, pills and liquids to provide significant boosts of energy, or else slow down his racing imagination and allow him to rest.