Most consumers think little in regards to the potential dangers of the products they buy each day. The assumption is twofold: first, that the present authorities have safeguards in place to stop the worst from happening, and second, that nobody can be ghastly enough to intentionally tamper with something that an unwitting person could eat.
This is basically true today, but this was not the case in 1982, when a series of deaths caused national panic and nearly brought down the pharmaceutical giant. The murders, later called the Chicago Tylenol Murders, remain unsolved, however the changes they dropped at American consumer culture proceed to affect consumers greater than three a long time later.
The gruesome crime began in September 1982, when 12-year-old Mary Kellerman complained to her parents that she had a chilly. The Kellermans gave her a Tylenol capsule. She died just a couple of hours later. That same morning, postal employee Adam Janus died of what was initially regarded as a heart attack.
His brother and sister-in-law, Stanley and Teresa, returned home after hearing the news of the tragedy. They also died shortly after taking extra-strength Tylenol capsules from the identical bottle Adam had opened earlier that day. Three more deaths occurred in quick succession: Mary McFarland, Paula Prince, and Mary Weiner died suddenly shortly after taking Tylenol capsules.
Police checked the one connection the seven victims shared: the undeniable fact that all of them took Tylenol hours or days before their deaths. In each case, the capsules were sent to laboratories for testing, which revealed a terrifying fact: the capsules contained potassium cyanide in a dose strong enough to kill an individual persistently over.
Police concluded that since only Chicago-area residents were affected by cyanide and there have been no other fatalities anywhere else within the country, the capsules should have been modified at the shop level, not at production.
They speculated that the killer should have taken bottles from local store shelves, poisoned the capsules and placed them back on store shelves. Thus, the murders weren’t intentional, but moderately random acts against unknown victims. The police were surprised by the possible motive for the murder.
The death caused panic throughout the country. Worried people flooded hospitals and flooded poison control hotlines, fearing that they had ingested contaminated drugs. Adding fuel to the fireplace, imitators on the lookout for their very own five minutes of fame have contaminated Tylenol caps with every part from rat poison to hydrochloric acid.
In the month following the Tylenol murders, there have been over 2 hundred copycat cases. For its part, Tylenol manufacturer Johnson & Johnson responded to the murders and subsequent panic by withdrawing all Tylenol products and promoting, costing it tens of millions of dollars. The company's future was doubtful; it seemed that the enormous had no probability of recovering from this disaster.
As for the person or individuals who caused the panic, the police were at a loss. In October 1982, tax attorney James Lewis wrote a letter to Johnson & Johnson demanding $1 million to “stop the killings.” Police found Lewis in New York.
Lewis denied having anything to do with the Tylenol murders, but his denial didn't stop investigators from being suspicious. He had a dark past. In Kansas City in 1978, he was charged with murder after police found the stays of his former client in bags in his attic. The charges were dropped when a judge found that police had searched his home illegally.
Despite his murderous history, Lewis could never be specifically linked to the Tylenol murders. However, the letter was enough to get him charged with extortion, which led to Lewis serving 13 of his 20-year sentence in federal prison.
In 2008, the FBI reopened the investigation, again specializing in Lewis as a probable suspect. However, their investigation didn’t produce any recent leads. The perpetrator stays a mystery.
After the murders, Johnson & Johnson took the lead, pledging to guard its customers from such attacks. They introduced tamper-evident packaging, which eventually became the industry standard for all over-the-counter drugs. They also introduced the capsule, a tablet that may very well be swallowed as easily as a capsule but was rather more difficult to govern.
Tylenol rebounded after the killings and once more became the best-selling over-the-counter painkiller. The government also responded. In 1983, Congress passed the “Tylenol Act,” which made tampering with consumer products against the law. For its part, the Food and Drug Administration has established federal guidelines for manufacturers to make use of recent tamper-evident packaging.
The unlucky truth is that it often takes a tragedy just like the Chicago Tylenol murder to implement protections that appear obvious in hindsight.
But nobody on the time could have imagined that you may be so twisted as to poison an over-the-counter medicine utilized by tens of millions of individuals of all ages. Seven people died, murdered for reasons that will never be discovered. This is little consolation for his or her family members, but their deaths provided safeguards which have protected tens of millions of individuals from suffering the identical fate for a long time.
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