Tylenol Poisonings Case Study

In the fall of 1982, McNeil Consumer Products, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, was confronted with a crisis when seven people on Chicago's West Side died mysteriously. Authorities determined that each of the people that died, had ingested an Extra-Strength Tylenol capsule laced with cyanide. The news of this incident traveled quickly and was the cause of a massive, nationwide panic. These poisonings made it necessary for Johnson & Johnson to launch a public relations program immediately, in order to save the integrity of both their product and their corporation as a whole.

The Story of the Tylenol Poisonings

When 12 year-old Mary Kellerman of Elk Grove Village, Ill., awoke at dawn with cold symptoms, her parents gave her one Extra-Strength
Evidence suggests that the pills were taken from different stores over a period of weeks or months. The bottles, some of which had five or less cyanide laced capsules and one which had ten, were tampered with and then placed back on the shelves of five different stores in the Chicago area. It seems that the person responsible for the deaths, spent a few hours distributing the laced bottles of Tylenol. (Tylenol Murders, 2)

The publicity about the cyanide laced capsules immediately caused a nationwide panic. A hospital in Chicago received 700 telephone calls about Tylenol in one day. People in cities across the country were admitted to hospitals on suspicion of poisoning by cyanide. (Tifft, 18)

Along with a nationwide scare, the poisoned capsules brought with them copycats, who attempted to simulate the tamperings in Chicago. In the first month after the Tylenol related deaths, the Food and Drug Administration counted 270 incidents of suspected product tampering. Although, the FDA thinks this number may have been inflated by the hysteria of consumers who blame any type of headache or nausea on food and medicine they think may have been poisoned. The FDA estimated that only about 36 of the cases were, "true tamperings." (Church,