Tylenol Chief Says Seals Can Be Replaced

The chairman of the company that manufactures Tylenol capsules acknowledged Wednesday that it is possible to remove and replace the three layers of seals designed to prevent tampering with the painkiller, but he said there is no evidence that that was the case in the latest Tylenol poisoning.

“There’s no question you can take the package apart and put it back together again,” James Burke, head of Johnson & Johnson, told reporters at a news conference. “The question is this one: Is there evidence that that has been done? The FBI says, looking at the package, that they have no evidence that it has been tampered with.”

The tamper-resistant packaging, developed in 1982 after seven people died from cyanide-laced Tylenol in Chicago, has come under scrutiny since a New York woman died Feb. 8 after taking Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules contaminated with cyanide. Diane Elsroth, a 23-year-old stenographer from Peekskill, N.Y., died at the Yonkers, N.Y., home of her boyfriend, who told authorities that he had opened a new bottle and given her two capsules after she complained of feeling ill.

No one has ever been charged in the Chicago deaths, although investigators do not believe that the same person is responsible for the latest incident.

Burke said experts within his company have successfully removed and replaced the seals but added: “I’m not saying the average person could do it.”

‘An Elaborate Process’

He reaffirmed that “it is our strong conviction that it didn’t happen in the plant or the warehouse, because we can’t figure out how it could have. And we’ve gone over and over and over again our production methods, and also our distribution methods, to see how this could possibly have happened. And we’re even examining things like counterfeiting the labels and counterfeiting the numbers. If it happened, it was an elaborate, elaborate process.”

Burke told reporters that he had had a nightmare about the Chicago killings two days before the latest death was disclosed.

“I guess it’s true with lots of us--when things start going too well, we start to worry,” he said, referring to Tylenol’s high sales during the past year. “I did worry. That Saturday night . . . I had a dream that Chicago had happened all over again. And, of course, Monday we found out that it didn’t happen in Chicago but, indeed, we had had an incident in Westchester.”

The first two anniversaries of the Chicago murders, he said, “were sleepless nights for me because I thought, if somebody’s out there, that’s when they’ll do it. They didn’t. And I had come to the point where I was really quite convinced that that was an isolated incident and behind us once and for all.”

Burke speculated that the poisoner is “someone who is mentally ill” and “these kinds of people, for the most part, know they’re not well.”

He added: “They don’t like to be called kooks, but they don’t mind being called sick. They understand at some level that they are sick. There has been enormous progress in the area of mental health. There are things that can be done. It doesn’t mean that the person wouldn’t have to deal with the halls of justice, but it does mean that the person might be able to get some help if they wanted. I don’t know; I’m just reaching.”