In the 1930s, a single street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side was home to 80 pickle merchants. Sidewalks and store aisles displayed big-bellied oak casks stuffed with aromatic vegetables aging in spicy brine. A customer could lift a barrel lid, pick out some pickles and fold them into a waxed paper bundle, pay a few pennies and then happily go on their way.
No longer. There are no pickle barrels anymore, because while wood-slatted casks aged pickles better than glass containers, they can’t be cleaned to meet food safety regulations. Anyone eager for a kosher dill now has to screw open a factory-tightened jar, which requires the strength of Superman — who survived his origin in 1930s New York City better than the pickle barrels that might have been familiar to the original Clark Kent.
The challenge of the pickle jar is nothing, though, compared to the annoyance of over-the-counter medicine packaging. In our house, it usually comes down to kitchen shears, a steak knife and some colorful curses aimed at Big Pharma. But we might more fairly target our ire at what really provoked those triple-sealed containers and plastic shrink bands and heat-sealed flats requiring laceration.
It all goes back to the 1982 Tylenol murders – when seven people in the Chicago area died from ingesting cyanide-laced Extra-Strength Tylenol. That’s the incident that gave rise to regulations on drug packaging, which in turn led to tighter food packaging, and even to those impossible-to-open seals around such consumer products as batteries and computers.
There’s a lesson in that history – namely, we are reminded of how far we’ve fallen in our ability and willingness to respond to a crisis, or even to make it seem as though we care about a crisis. A business executive might say that our government is no longer any good at crisis or brand management.
Within days of the deaths in Illinois — the manufacturer of Tylenol, Johnson & Johnson, issued public health warnings about its product and pulled 31 million bottles of the drugs off the shelves. And then Johnson & Johnson issued warnings not to use Tylenol and set up a toll-free line for worried consumers, and laid out what it was doing to protect people. Within weeks, Tylenol was relaunched with triple-seal packaging — including a cotton wad, a foil seal, a childproof cap and a plastic sealing strip.
The government made that the industry standard the next year, when 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.
Consider, in contrast, how inept our Congress is these days at even fulfilling its basic job of passing a federal budget. Our elected legislators don’t tackle tough issues as much as talk about them, only rarely thoughtfully. Work in Congress nowadays is more about appearance than action – it’s performative more than substantive.
It's not just that Congress isn’t capable. We know Americans also aren’t fans of the president – which is why Joe Biden gave up his re-election bid.
And think about how little faith Americans now have in our Supreme Court – which, importantly, recently issued a decision that many experts think will make it much harder for government to do much of anything.
That was in a ruling throwing out the so-called “Chevron deference” – which for a half-century underlaid the way government does a lot of its business. The Supreme Court has essentially taken away any standard for courts to use in evaluating federal regulations. I was reading a piece the other day by a Yale professor of environmental law, Daniel Esty, who is convinced that chaos is likely to result as judges without expertise begin to hand down varying rulings on important topics like environmental protection, health care and land use. We won’t be able to track what the law is and what it isn’t.
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. Imagine if Congress hadn’t acted to set standards, or if the president at the time, Ronald Reagan, had insisted that his conservative administration would not issue regulations on drug packaging and tampering. Imagine if the Supreme Court had decided that judges should decide complex health safety issues, rather than experts in agencies acting on the basis of laws enacted by Congress.
So here’s what I think about 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 – from the private sector, from Congress and from the executive branch. That’s the sort of action that the Supreme Court is making much more unlikely in years to come.
You can’t help but figure that if the right-wing crisis deniers of today were in charge a few decades back, we might still be digging in wooden barrels for pickles. We would pull out some tasty pickles, yes, but we wouldn’t get the safety and security that a complex society has a right to expect its government to deliver.
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.