Rajneeshpuram — A utopian commune that poisoned a town to win an election

Rajneeshpuram was a religious commune built between 1981 and 1985 on a remote 64,000-acre ranch in Wasco County, Oregon, by followers of the Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, later known as Osho. At its height around 1984 it housed roughly 7,000 residents and operated as an incorporated city with its own services and an armed security force. In September 1984, in an attempt to swing a county election, the commune’s leadership carried out the largest bioterror attack in United States history, deliberately contaminating salad bars at ten restaurants in the nearby town of The Dalles with salmonella and sickening 751 people. No one died, but 45 were hospitalized. The plot, along with wiretapping, immigration fraud, and an attempted-murder conspiracy, unraveled in 1985: the commune’s de facto leader Ma Anand Sheela and other lieutenants fled and were later convicted, Rajneesh pleaded to immigration crimes and was deported, and the commune collapsed.

The attack was not the act of fanatics on the fringe of the movement but a decision made at its operational center. Sheela Silverman — Ma Anand Sheela, Rajneesh’s personal secretary and the commune’s chief administrator — directed a tight inner circle that ran Rajneeshpuram’s affairs while the guru himself spent years in public silence. With the surrounding county hostile and a 1984 election looming for two seats that could decide land-use battles over the commune’s future, that inner circle hatched a scheme to make local voters too sick to go to the polls. They tested it, then deployed it across The Dalles. The salmonella strain was later matched to a culture in the commune’s own medical laboratory.

What makes Rajneeshpuram instructive is the trajectory from idealism to crime. Thousands of educated, often Western followers had come seeking a new kind of community — work, meditation, sexual openness, and belonging under a charismatic teacher. The commune they built was real and, in many ways, functional. But isolation, a hardening us-versus-them siege mentality, and the concentration of power in an unaccountable inner circle turned a utopian experiment into an organization willing to poison its neighbors. The delusion was not only the guru’s promised enlightenment; it was the conviction, inside a sealed world, that the commune’s survival justified anything done to outsiders.

This dossier states the ending first. The aim is to trace how a community of seekers arrived at mass poisoning, and how the law finally reached the people who ordered it.