The New Yorker:

On September 29, 1982, a twelve-year-old girl named Mary Kellerman woke up with a cold. Her parents gave her some extra-strength Tylenol and, within a few hours, she had died. That same day, in a town near the family’s Chicago suburb, a twenty-seven-year-old postal worker named Adam Janus felt ill; he, too, took Tylenol and died hours later. Janus’s brother and sister-in-law gathered at his home to grieve, developed headaches, and took Tylenol from the same bottle; both died shortly thereafter. Three more mysterious deaths soon followed. State and federal investigators descended on the Chicago area. They quickly determined that the Tylenol had been laced with cyanide: someone had taken bottles off the shelf, injected the capsules with poison, and put them back into stores.

Within a week, more than ninety per cent of Americans had heard that cyanide-laced Tylenol was killing people in Chicago. Sales of the medication plummeted by four-fifths. Johnson & Johnson recalled every bottle in the country, at a cost of more than a hundred million dollars, then began working with the Food and Drug Administration to develop tamper-proof packaging. Tylenol had come in capsules, which were easy to swallow but could be opened and adulterated; the company replaced them with “caplet” pills that were much harder to contaminate, and started packaging them in foil-sealed childproof containers. Not long afterward, Congress made it a federal offense to tamper with consumer products, and the F.D.A. started requiring tamper-resistant packaging for all drugs. In the years since, there have been scattered attempts at similar crimes, but none as deadly as the Tylenol murders. Today, Americans hardly ever worry that their medications or groceries might contain poison.

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