Deborah Blum

area and Maryland and Virginia.

and bought super fresh produce.

They carefully got food that had never had preservatives in it.

They cooked all kinds of elaborate, wonderful meals.

And when you go back and you look at the pictures of the dining room, it kind of looks like a nice restaurant, right?

It's got these round tables.

They have white tablecloths.

He got nice china and flatware.

They've got these ladder-backed

chairs and beautifully polished glasses.

And I think that was part of his plan.

He wanted it to feel like I'm just dining with friends.

He didn't want it to feel like I'm being experimented on.

So he chose borax first because he thought, and he actually testified to Congress about this, that it wasn't that dangerous, and he wanted to start low-end.

He thought, you know, some of them might get an upset stomach or something, but he actually had expected very little effect.

But the test subjects were able to figure that out so quickly that basically they ended up just saying, you need to swallow this capsule with every meal and we're going to stand there and watch you do it.

And this Poison Squad, as it went forward, got a huge amount of attention.

It wasn't just that newspapers were covering it.

There were songs about it.

There were shows about it.