If the seal is broken…..
The 1982 Tylenol Scandal that altered our buying confidence.
There was a time when you could walk into any supermarket or drug store and purchase a bottle of Tylenol and pop off the top and take a couple of pills. No sealed barriers or foil to puncture. This was a time of naivety and bold trust in humankind when you could never conceive of the notion that a person would poison a capsule with the purpose to kill random souls just for the thrill of it? This actually happened in the United States in 1982!
Tylenol was a giant in the industry of pain relief. Johnson & Johnson, was one of the top brands in the analgesic market and within the company, it was also a large income earner that commanded nearly 15% of the company’s total profits. The 1982 crisis was not only a big blow to the brand, but also to the company as a whole. The crisis jeopardized the company’s survival putting at risk a multi million investment which the investors had a lot of faith in. The fact that the crisis was due to no-fault of their own didn’t matter so they had to act swiftly to mitigate huge impending losses. This was a turning-point- moment for the top management of Johnson & Johnson and more so to the CEO, James Burke. Gaining the trust back from the public was going to take a huge amount of work along with excellent timing. They needed to act swiftly and prudently. They did.
According to TIME Magazine’s 1982 report, Food and Drug Administration officials hypothesized that the killer bought Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules over the counter, injected cyanide into the red half of the capsules, resealed the bottles, and sneaked them back onto the shelves of drug and grocery stores. The Illinois attorney general, on the other hand, suspected a disgruntled employee on Tylenol’s factory line. In either case, it was a sophisticated and ambitious undertaking with the seemingly pathological goal of killing strangers entirely at random. Their symptoms and sudden deaths confounded doctors until the link was discovered, traced back to identical pill bottles that each smelled like almonds — the telltale scent of cyanide. The perpetrator left no margin for error, filling the capsules with poison at thousands of times the amount needed to be fatal. The re-call sent shock waves through the American Drug Stores and Supermarkets.
A Race Down the Aisle….
A young stock-boy in a Chicago based Jewel-Osco drug store scurries down the Pain Relief aisle trailed by an overweight balding manager gripping his eyeglasses in his right hand while running his left hand along the shelves toward the pain relievers. The stock boy clutching an empty cardboard box in front of him in which he hijacked from the Halloween Aisle imitated bobbing missions by dumping bags of candy to either side of him to make room for the emergency re-call of tainted capsules. Hoping the Halloween box would be big enough the stock boy makes his way to the Extra-Strength Tylenol section shoving his left arm as far into the shelf as he could while making a swooping motion behind the product so that he could dump as many pill containers into the box as possible. Some falling to the ground and across the floor and others getting jammed between his arm and the shelf. With an extra yank of his arm the stock boy plows through the remaining pill boxes even ripping open some of them to reveal their bright red caps like open sores. Neatness didn’t count in a race where the confiscation of every Tylenol product known to man was the prize at the end of this game.
The manager of Jewel-Osco, Artie Creskie, was a retail lifer. Starting out as a stock-boy, like the one he recruited to pull product, Artie was scared that his store may have held one of the tainted pills that killed a customer. Beads of sweat became rivers of fear. Not because the 52 years old family man feared for losing his job but but that his entire career and reputation came down to whether or not he may of missed a suspicious shopper stealing then placing boxes of Tylenol back on the shelf without him noticing. Surveillance cameras were not sophisticated in 1982 and were expensive. Small retail stores if they were lucky to be equipped with a camera were not reliable as they were either blurry or broken. Stores like Jewel-Osco relied on fictitious shoppers to catch a thief or their very own managers would stand above the aisles with a 2 way mirror while smoking packs of camel cigarettes to observe shifty shoppers. Creskie knew at that moment that his laziness and inattentiveness could have cost a life or multiple lives. He began making bargains with God;
“if you let me go on this one and no one dies I promise not to be lazy anymore. I promise to go to church and not ignore my wife when she comes to me with a problem. I promise to make more time with my kids. I promise…… “
Not believing that his best stock boy pulled every box of Extra Strength Tylenol, Creskie pressed his face into the vortex darkness of the empty shelf. Visually bypassing the decades old chewing gum bumps and with his breath blowing away dust balls and the care free shiny price-gun wrappers that tend to be left behind after tagging new items. Anyone who worked in retail know how they tend to curl and roll into circles and with the slightest breeze skirt across the surface like a Russian ballet. Still not satisfied and panicking Creskie unhinged the shelf by slamming his open hand underneath and crashing it against the one above to loosen. Then with all his strength yanking it from it’s original home to reveal a bigger space perfect for inspection. One smashed box lay jammed all the way in the back. Probably a casualty from when the last time the shelf was put in. Although he knew it could not be part of the recall due to it’s age, his rage was overwhelming. Reaching down to the crushed pill box Creskie squeezed it and threw it across the aisle missing his valued stock boy by centimetres. He wiped the sweat from his eyes and removed his glasses as his breathing reached it’s maximum effort.
“Max! Bring these pills back to the stock room and call the police. Put signs all over that we were mandated to recall all Tylenol products. Then buy me a pack of cigarettes from the first register.” Exclaimed Creskie
Local police pulled up to the Jewel-Osco store along with volunteer EMS from Kankakee County. Creskie was having chest pains and they were there to clear him of any immediate danger. Sitting on a small break-room folding chair pulled from one of their Summertime patio sets, his body was clearly larger then the cheap aluminum seat as it bent to one side due to his large frame. With his right sleeve rolled up and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, EMT driver Chloe Sturgess, began pumping the blood pressure band telling Creskie to “relaaax” in the thickest of Chicago accent you could envision. His other arm rested on a cheap folding table beautifully decorated with picnic table red shelving paper and sticky with grains of old fried rice from someones lunch from a few days prior. Also sprinkled with sugar from those employees who missed their foam coffee cups and didn’t bother to wipe it up. Typical of break rooms across America some left over bright green paint that they couldn’t sell at a discount lavished the scuffed walls as a basket of returns side side ways next to the mini-fridge for employees. The break room was close to both the men’s and ladies room with a stench of Urinal Pods and Consort hair spray (belonging to Creskie) so he could hold onto the couple of strands of hair he had left.
What’s in the Box!
The deaths began on Sept. 29, when 12-year-old Mary Kellerman died within hours of taken a capsule of Extra-Strength Tylenol. Later that same day, a postal worker, Adam Janus died. Both had been poisoned with potassium cyanide, which investigators later determined had been put inside the capsules of Tylenol.
Another five people would die, including Janus’ brother, Stanley, and sister-in-law Theresa, who had each taken acetaminophen capsules from the same bottle of Extra-Strength Tylenol that killed the postal worker. Mary McFarland, Paula Prince and Mary Reiner, all living in or near Chicago, also died. Tylenol samples taken from each of the victims’ homes tested positive for cyanide.
On Oct. 5, 1982, Johnson & Johnson, the maker of Tylenol, pulled millions of dollars worth of product off store shelves, reducing the company’s earnings by $50 million. There was nationwide panic as worried consumers went to hospitals out of fear of poisoning. The Food and Drug Administration counted hundreds of copycat incidents nationwide, including one in 1986 in which two people in died after taking cyanide-laced Excedrin capsules.
While home resting a couple of weeks later, Artie Creskie received a call by the FBI informing him that his Jewel-Osco store was not one of the places where laced pills were found. With his hand on his forehead and the other holding the phone he wept. He wept for the victims that had died and for himself that he did not have anything to do with allowing the killer in his store. After the Excedrin scare in 1986 Artie left retail going out on permanent disability due to emotional stress. He passed-away in 1996 from a heart attack. His wife Julie believes it was a broken heart that killed Artie. Even though his store did not house the tainted pills he felt so deeply saddened by the prospect of it possibly happening again. Even with the new packaging of sealed pill tops Artie was never the same.
From Recall to Recover
After the re-call, Johnson & Johnson developed new product protection methods and ironclad pledges to do better in protecting their consumers in the future. Working with FDA officials, they introduced a new tamper-proof packaging, which included foil seals and other features that made it obvious to a consumer if foul play had transpired. These packaging protections soon became the industry standard for all over-the-counter medications. The company also introduced price reductions and a new version of their pills — called the “caplet” — a tablet coated with slick, easy-to-swallow gelatin but far harder to tamper with than the older capsules which could be easily opened, laced with a contaminant, and then placed back in the older non-tamper-proof bottle.
Within a year, and after an investment of more than $100 million, Tylenol’s sales rebounded to its healthy past and it became, once again, the nation’s favorite over-the-counter pain reliever. Critics who had prematurely announced the death of the brand Tylenol were now praising the company’s handling of the matter. Indeed, the Johnson & Johnson recall became a classic case study in business schools across the nation.
In 1983, the U.S. Congress passed what was called “the Tylenol bill,” making it a federal offense to tamper with consumer products. In 1989, the FDA established federal guidelines for manufacturers to make all such products tamper-proof.
The only person convicted in relation to the case was James Lewis, who later sent a letter to Johnson & Johnson demanding $1 million in order to “stop the killings.” He spent 12 years in prison for extortion, but police never charged him with tampering with the capsules. In the years since investigators are no closer to solid evidence that implicates a single person, group or even an employee of J&J as being responsible. DNA technology was not available in 1982 and when this advanced ability to do so was realized in the mid 1990’s a print lifted from one of the tainted boxes showed no match to anyone with a criminal connection. The victims families remain without any answers.
