Poisoned Faith: The Rajneesh Cult and the Salmonella Plot
Poisoned Faith: The Rajneesh Cult and the Salmonella Plot
by Linda Davidson
In the autumn of 1984, hundreds of people in The Dalles, Oregon, sat down to ordinary meals-salad bars, pizza, coffee with friends. Within hours, emergency rooms were overflowing. Doctors first blamed bad luck and bad food.
It wasn't bad luck.
It was America's first large-scale bioterror attack.
Poisoned Faith takes you inside Rajneeshpuram, the utopian desert commune built by followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and into the sealed back rooms where devotion quietly hardened into conspiracy. Through immersive, meticulously researched narrative, Linda Davidson traces how a spiritual experiment promising freedom and enlightenment produced petri dishes, wiretaps, sham marriages-and a plan to contaminate local restaurants with salmonella to sway an election.
From the early days of orange-robed meditation in India to the Rolls-Royces in Oregon, from the rise of Ma Anand Sheela to the poisoning of salad bars and the FBI raid that exposed a secret lab, this book follows both the believers who thought they were building paradise and the investigators who slowly realized the town was under deliberate attack.
Inside you'll find:
A vivid, scene-by-scene reconstruction of the 1984 salmonella outbreak in The Dalles-and how doctors and epidemiologists pieced together that it was no accident.
The story of Rajneeshpuram's rise in rural Oregon: a "city of love" that became a fortress of surveillance, internal security teams, and high-stakes political schemes.
A chilling look at Ma Anand Sheela and her inner circle as they move from loyalty to wiretapping, from election manipulation to biological warfare.
The secret lab behind the commune's medical center: how salmonella was grown, tested on insiders, and carried into town in vials and perfume bottles.
The federal investigation, raid, and court cases that followed-plus the uneasy question of what Bhagwan knew, and how he walked away while others went to prison.
A deeper exploration of cult psychology, moral justification, and how intelligent, idealistic people can be led to believe that making strangers violently ill is "self-defense."
For readers of serious true crime and narrative non-fiction, Poisoned Faith is an unflinching, humane account of the Rajneesh bioterror plot-neither demonizing every follower nor excusing the crimes of their leaders.
This is not just the story of a cult.
It is the story of how belief can be weaponized-quietly, scientifically, and in plain sight.
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