Pill bottles are a pain. In our house, encounters with over-the-counter medications typically involve kitchen shears, a steak knife and some colorful curses aimed at Big Pharma. There are triple-sealed containers to be cut, plastic shrink bands to be sliced, heat-sealed flats to be lacerated.
Listen, this isn’t just a rant by an old guy with nothing better to complain about. There’s a point here, which comes from how all this over-zealous protective packaging came about. It started 41 years ago, when seven people in the Chicago area were poisoned by cyanide-laced Extra-Strength Tylenol. That’s what gave rise to regulations on drug packaging – which, you know, led to tighter food packaging, and then to impossible-to-open containers surrounding things like batteries and computers.
But imagine the panic in Illinois in 1982: People of various ages were suddenly dropping dead moments after swallowing Tylenol – which was the best-selling pain reliever in the nation, holding 37 percent of the market share. What’s amazing is that there wasn’t any lasting damage to the Tylenol brand. I mean, car showrooms don’t feature Chevy Corvairs or Ford Pintos anymore – those brand-name products disappeared because people lost confidence in their safety.
But that didn’t happen with Tylenol. And, in that, there’s a lesson for our public officials – who we might all agree are kind of a damaged brand these days.
What happened with Tylenol in 1982 was unusual because there was no corporate cover-up. In fact, Johnson & Johnson issued public health warnings about its product and demanded that stores pull 31 million bottles of the drugs off the shelves. This was a big deal for J&J: Tylenol accounted for one-third of the company’s year-to-year profit growth and 17 percent of its net income. Market analysts predicted that the brand would never recover. Panic selling caused J&J share prices to tumble.
But corporate leaders quickly put forward a message of safety first. They issued warnings not to use Tylenol and set up a toll-free line for worried consumers and questioning reporters. And within weeks, Tylenol was relaunched with triple-seal packaging — including a cotton wad, a foil seal, a childproof cap and a plastic sealing strip.
That became the industry standard – and then the Food and Drug Administration issued a regulation requiring tamper-resistant packaging on all over-the-counter drugs. Congress followed by making it a crime to tamper with that packaging.
All this was costly for Johnson & Johnson – the drug recall and relaunch cost the company $100 million – but it worked: Less than three months after the first death was reported, J&J’s stock topped its pre-crisis high, and within a few more months Tylenol regained its market share. Today, the company’s crisis management is considered a model in graduate school curriculums for marketing, communications and business ethics.
So consider for a moment how that record contrasts with what we might consider the crisis management strategies of institutions of our federal government today.
Take the U.S. Supreme Court, for starters. Strong investigative reporting has uncovered activities by justices that would lead officials in other government roles to lose their jobs, or at least be reprimanded. Justice Clarence Thomas accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars of gifts and lavish travel accommodations from a billionaire Republican campaign donor, then failed to disclose them; and his wife played an active role in an attempt to overturn the election of Joe Biden, which Justice Thomas implicitly endorsed when Donald Trump’s effort to unravel American democracy came before the top court. Justice Samuel Alito took expensive fishing vacations on the dime of a different billionaire, who later had business before the court. The taxpayer-funded staff of Justice Sonia Sotomayor has urged groups asking her to speak to buy bulk orders of her books.
Congressional Republicans won’t go along with a Democratic proposal for a tough code of ethics for the high court. Finally, the other day, after months of claiming there’s no problem here, the justices adopted a code of ethics for themselves – but it has no enforcement mechanism, and, in fact, no oversight at all. But it’s something. And it’s about time: 62 percent of voters told pollsters this spring that they have not very much or no confidence in the Supreme Court. That’s not good for democracy. You might consider it a crisis.
Of course, Congress has more than enough of its own crises to confront. It can’t pass a federal budget because compromise has become impossible in our hyper-partisan environment. It’s still blocking military promotions, and constantly threatening a government shutdown. Congress is these days a place where members make a show rather than make legislation.
Back to 1982, then: Imagine if the makers of Tylenol had responded to the crisis on drugstore shelves by doing nothing, or by pushing back against efforts to make the public safe. Picture not only the impact on the business success of J& J — what might have happened, that is, if consumers hadn’t regained confidence in Tylenol — but also the lives that might have been lost if more tainted drugs had reached consumers. Remember, the government required safe packaging only after private industry itself stepped forward to protect consumers – and, of course, market share.
Here’s what I think about, then, as I struggle to open a pill bottle: We’re protected from potentially adulterated drugs because a crisis was met with swift action based on ethical standards. That’s the sort of response that seems so sadly uncommon in government just now. Really, if we left it up to the Supreme Court and Congress, we’d probably be still be driving Corvairs and Pintos.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.