I was just a little kid in Portland at the time that the Rajneeshees were active. The followers seemed harmless hippies. Though obviously there was something wrong with the cult leader driving around in Rolls Royce, while a bunch of followers donated all their belongings.<p>(That childhood impression might've been influenced by very Catholic parents, and seeing only priests who really lived their vows of poverty and service to others. Other religions also seemed wholesome, if accidentally not the correct one. But televangelists were obviously greedy manipulators.)<p>As an adult today, I'd quickly fit the Rashneeshees to archetypes. But I wonder, in 1984, how much information was public, that people who followed the news would've reasonably considered that this group would go and try to poison large numbers of people, to rig an election.