On September 29, 1982, Mary Kellerman woke up feeling ill. The 12-year-old girl of each thick people, a Chicago suburb, asked her parents to stay at home from school, and her an extra -strongth Tylenol capsule. I was dead a few hours later.
The doctors assumed that he had died from a congenital heart condition or perhaps for an aneurysm. But then, six more people in the Chicagoland area, aged between 19 and 35 years, also died on the same day of mysterious circumstances.
In a short time, firefighters realized that all deaths had one thing in common: Tylenol. After the bottles were examined by a forensic doctor, it was discovered that they were covered with cyanide.
The deaths became “one of the most widely covered news events since the murder of President John F. Kennedy almost twenty years before,” writes Gardiner Harris in his new book, “No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson,” Out Noyson ”
“The three national networks made the center of their transmissions for weeks. Almost all newspapers in the country covered it during autumn, with more than one hundred thousand individual stories.”
It was a terrifying moment for consumers throughout the country. But it was especially discouraging for Johnson & Johnson executives, one of the most beloved brands in the country.
“Few US corporations have faced that disaster,” writes Harris.
Tylenol was just a better seller for Johnson & Johnson; It was the most important and iconic product of the company.
“Sales were expected in 1982 to approach $ 500 million and represent almost 20% of their profits,” says Harris. “Now all the main media organizations on the planet were linking Tylenol with death. The company had to rescue the franchise, but how?”
He did not help that the mayor of Chicago, Jane Byrne, held a press conference that implored the city’s residents to bring their tylenol to the nearest police station.
“Don’t take Tylenol,” he said, “not only on a table or liquid form.” It was, to say the least, the moment of the imaginable sausage public relations.
Johnson & Johnson was at a crossroads. Depending on how executives responded, they could scare their loyal customers forever or demonstrate that they were a company and a brand to be reliable.
In the end, they managed to achieve the latter.
His answer “has been seen for a long time as the most ethical, honest and effective crisis reaction in American corporate history,” writes Harris.
Johnson & Johnson has faced many scandals throughout the years that could be (and in many cases, shoulder They have destroyed them.
From demands that claim that their risperdal antipsychotic medicine did not notice the side effects such as the growth of male breasts, to a national withdrawal of 2020 throughout the dust after evidence arose that it was contaminated with asbestos of cause of cancer, to the FDA to the FDA, the risks of blood clots that loved life.
But it was the Tylenol scandal that would define the company forever. Before poisoning, “few people knew that Johnson & Johnson did Tylenol,” Harris writes.
But after their response, the surveys found “almost universal recognition.” Last January, Fortune magazine classified Johnson & Johnson as one of the world’s most admired corporations during the year 23 consecutive.
“If there is a more American – Quintiantialy American – Company that Johnson & Johnson, I don’t know what it is, ”said Tyler Mathisen, a CNBC anchor for a long time, a network health conference in May 2019.
How did Johnson and Johnson survive not only survive but also prospered after Tylenol or 1982’s panic? First, they acted fast. J & J executives agreed to remove each Tylenol capsule on each store shelf, around 31 million bottles. “It was the largest drug retreat in history and cost J & J $ 100 million to manage,” writes Harris.
They also quickly added protective stamps to all new Tylenol products, with a plastic ring around the neck of pills bottles and a sheet placed on the mouth of the bottle.
“These measures were soon adopted by each manufacturer of free sales medications,” writes Harris.
But while it seemed that the company was decisive and expeditious, they were well prepared for this moment.
“In the previous three years, the company had 300 complaints about contamination,” writes Harris. Johnson & Johnson was already working on the manipulative resistant packaging, so when Tylenol poisoning occurred.
They also had more than helped the company protect their public image: the most corrupt FDA commissioner in history.
Dr. Arthur Hayes Jr., who served as FDA Commissioner between 1981 and 1983, “the regulation of Beinvert medications should be a collaboration process,” writes Harris. His idea of collaboration involved bribes of pharmaceutical companies.
Tylenol poisoning allowed him the opportunity to demonstrate his loyalty to the medical drug giant. Hayes “lost little time to publicly exonerate Johnson & Johnson,” writes Harris. “FDA officials have just told journalists that the two lots linked to poisoning were not called ‘retreats’, which would be a manufacturing defect.”
There is no conclusive evidence that J & J has ever paid Hays a ten cents as a FDA commissioner, “but much of the rest of his life (after retiring as commissioner) working for a public relations firm owned by an ex.
When Johnson & Johnson relaunched Tylenol only a few months later, on Thanksgiving of 1982, with manipulative resistant containers, the only free sale medication was lyrics with the additional security layer, “providing the product with a Harrites.”
It would be the last time Tylenol became a headache (without word game) for the company. In 1994, Antonio Benedi, former programmer of President George Hw Bush, Sed Johnson & Johnson, claiming that he suffered liver failure after using extra strength tylenol to treat the flu.
The jury granted almost $ 9 million in damages, and judicial documents found that “Johnson and Johnson knew for years that modern drinkers, a description that applies to most Americans, could suffer catastrophic livers of Ordinary.
The problem had begun decades before, when J & J increased the amount of acetaminophen from 325 to 500 milligrams per pill to combat the consumer’s belief that Tylenol, although surely, it was effective for other brands.
The FDA was reluctant to add a liver warning about bottles, considering unnecessary.
“The agency said that people who contemplate suicide would know the damage that the drug could do,” Harris writes.
The declared security of the brand, its most emblematic announcement, said it was the analgesic “the hospitals that use the most”, was, ironically, what made it so deadly.
A study by the University of Pennsylvania found that many patients who developed hepatic Tylenol damage never bother to read the Romanized dose as “they thought the drug was so safe,” writes Harris.
Despite the legal slap of the wrist, Johnson and Johnson emerged almost unscathed and today remains one of the largest and most reliable health companies in the world.
The 1982 Tylenol Poisonon has caused that the students of Cases of the Harvard Business School, which “used to teach thousands of training executives that if they do the right thing at a considerable cost, customers destroy them,” writes Harris.
Just within the internal ranks of J & J, a belief has solidified that “the company was a unique force beneficial for good in the world.”
They had a level of confidence of consumers that was “almost impossible to degrade,” writes Harris. It was, hey, he adds, “corporate gaslighting at an epic scale.”
