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Case Study: Johnson & Johnson Company Analysis

Founded in 1866 as a family business, Johnson & Johnson now has over 130,000 employees in 60 countries worldwide. What started off as a small, three-person business, the company has now expanded across the globe and was named a “2017 Fortune’s Most Admired Company”. One may wonder, how did brothers Robert, James, and Edward Johnson set the foundation for the next 130 years to come? This success can be attributed to Johnson & Johnson’s Strategic Framework, which is at the root of all decision-making. The company’s Strategic Framework is comprised of three main components: The Foundation, Strategic Principles, and Growth Drivers. All three sections of the Strategic Framework include insight into Johnson & Johnson’s Management Approach, which guides the company’s philosophy for continuous success.

The Foundation includes the Credo, which establishes the values incorporated into the decision-making process . The Credo can be seen in every single office and corner of Johnson & Johnson facilities . The Credo is a reminder of the standards that are upheld in correspondence with the company’s aspirations. The Strategic Principles include the company’s organizational approach, which is a decentralized structure in management for the long term. Lastly, the Growth Drivers are the areas of focus for growth and innovation, which include the Leadership Imperatives of Connect, Shape, Lead, and Deliver. These four Leadership Imperatives are considered the “4 Pillars” of Johnson & Johnson and are the main attributes the company looks for when seeking employment. The company is leadership-driven and needs leaders of employees to act as such. These three components support why Johnson & Johnson’s Strategic Framework is at the core of the business’ continued success for the past 130 years.

Mission and Vision

The mission of Johnson & Johnson is to, “Make diversity & inclusion how we work every day”. The purpose of a mission statement is to outline the foundation of the company’s goals and objectives. This mission is supported by the company’s vision of, “Be yourself, change the world”. Johnson & Johnson’s vision is a broader representation of where the firm plans to go in the future. These two statements validate why the company is listed as #16 of “The Happiest Companies to Work For in 2017”. Johnson & Johnson aspires to bring in natural-born leaders who are comfortable being themselves across a multitude of diverse backgrounds. Being comprised of 130,000 employees, the company wants to advance its unique culture to “spark solutions that create a better, healthier, world”. According to Forbes Patrick Hull, there are 4 essential questions that need to be answered in a mission statement. These four questions include the what, how, whom, and value brought. Johnson & Johnson’s mission is lacking half of these qualities because of how short and simple its statement is. The statement includes the what- diversity, and the value- inclusion; however, the statement does not go into the how or whom it addresses. Yet, one can imply the “how “by working across a range of diverse nations and the “whom” by those included in The Credo (patients, employees, communities, and shareholders). The statement is clear and concise but requires more implications than other traditional missions.

Johnson & Johnson is a company that is constantly pursuing its mission. This can be seen in its “Health for Humanity 2020 Goals”. The company’s “Health for Humanity 2020 Goals” are 15 goals that should be completed in a 5-year term to make “the places we live and work in healthier” across the world. These objectives are already being completed as seen in making and donating more than 160 million doses of medicine to children in underprivileged communities. These actions support the company’s mission by providing medicine to various societies and prioritizing physical well-being. The company’s mission, vision, and goals for 2020 align with The Foundation of the Strategic Framework, by always putting the people first.

Form of Organization

Johnson & Johnson converted from a private to a public corporation in 1944. Converting to a public corporation gave its shareholders and the public more visibility to the operations of the firm. Johnson & Johnson’s information can now be viewed on sources such as the NYSE. According to Zacks Investment Research, “being publicly traded is a two-edged sword”. This statement is due to the visibility that can put the company at a higher risk of failure exposure . If operations are not going as well as planned, this could reflect negatively in the company’s annual report and be used to a competitors’ advantage. Disclosing information that private firms are not required to do can have its perks as well as its downfalls. Shareholders appreciate the creditability as it allows them to access their day-to-day return, but this can also be put into a negative perspective if their return happens to plummet. Fortunately, Johnson & Johnson has had a consistent dividend growth for 55 years, which helps ensure its 2,419 shareholders (valued at $236 billion) that the company is in constant growth.

Besides being publicly traded, there are also advantages and disadvantages to being a corporation. The top three advantages of a corporation include limited liability, the ability to raise more money for investment, and size. Johnson & Johnson optimizes its limited liability and size capacity. Having limited liability is crucial for a large corporation like Johnson & Johnson. Since the company is in the consumer, pharmaceutical, and medical devices markets, it is vital for its owners to have limited losses in the company. This extra protection for its owners is extremely necessary right now with the issuance of lawsuit claims against the company for as much as $417 million. If the owners were liable for all the losses exceeding their investment, the owners may be entirely wiped out by now. Not only could this include the owners’ investment in the company, but it could also include their houses, cars, retirement funds, etc. Johnson & Johnson also leverages its size against competitors in its markets. Since the firm is so massive, it can accumulate enough profit and power every year to invest, acquire, and grow assets in the company.

On the other hand, the top three disadvantages of a corporation include extensive paperwork, double taxation, and difficulty of termination. Johnson & Johnson’s most evident disadvantages are double taxation and difficulty of termination. Since the company is a corporation, it is required to pay taxes twice: first, before it can distribute its income as dividends, and second, once the shareholders receive the dividends. Double taxation decreases the original net income that the firm annually earns. However, Johnson & Johnson acquires enough income to steadily grow every year, even with being taxed twice. It is almost impossible for the company to terminate now that it has expanded worldwide. The main downfall of impossible termination is if the company goes into large sums of debt, and ends up abandoning its employees as a result. The closing of the company would devastatingly leave over 130,000 people unemployed. Therefore, the firm needs to ensure profitable growth every year. Luckily, bankruptcy should not be a problem for Johnson & Johnson anytime soon, as it is currently one of the two AAA-rated companies in the United States for exceptional credit. Understanding the advantages and overcoming the disadvantages of being a corporation is why Johnson & Johnson has been so successful the past 130 years. The execution of its organizational form corresponds with the Strategic Principles in the Strategic Framework by managing for the long term.

Organization Size and Scope

The most recent data of 2017 Second-Quarter Results details Johnson & Johnson to currently have approximately 132,500 employees. These 132,500 employees are distributed among 250 different operating units with over a dozen research facilities in North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, to touch the lives of over a billion people every day, throughout the world. The company operates on a multi-divisional organizational structure , which is the most common organizational structure of large companies with multiple business units. The 250 operating units are restructured to incorporate leadership designed for each facility. A multi-divisional structure is the best way for Johnson & Johnson to maximize return and results, as the appropriate leadership can focus its expertise on its specific segments and business lines within the company.

Johnson & Johnson accumulated $18.8 billion in sales for Q2 which is up 1.9% versus a year ago. The $18.8 billion sales were broken down by $3.5 billion in consumer, $8.6 billion in pharmaceutical, and $6.7 billion in medical devices. The annual sales revenue of Johnson & Johnson in 2016 was $71.94 billion, and the company is projected to surpass this revenue at $76.1 billion by the end of 2017. The company utilizes its size and scope capacity to extend its services to the rest of the world, which resembles the Connect and Lead of the Growth Drivers in Johnson & Johnson’s Strategic Framework by being a leading provider in the consumer health, pharmaceutical, and medical devices industries.

One crucial element to a successful business is executing proper operational activities. Johnson & Johnson has recently extended its company base to include Supply Chain Management . For example, less than one year ago the Supply Chain Team in Buffalo Grove for major retailer Walgreens Co. started out as a two-person team. Within one year, the team now has over ten members and plans to grow by the year. Supply Chain now makes up 45% of employees working for Johnson & Johnson. Supply Chain has become crucially important to Johnson & Johnson’s Strategic Framework in the Foundation of the Credo. It is essential for the firm to not only allocate its resources efficiently but also environmentally friendly. Given a highly competitive atmosphere, Johnson & Johnson wants to advance its company with eco-friendly sustainability, which provides aid to the community aspect of the Credo.

For Johnson & Johnson to provide eco-friendly resource measures, the company must sustain proper inventory management . One tactic the company uses to handle its inventory is the FIFO valuation method. Johnson & Johnson implements a “first-in, first-out” inventory management approach to ensure proper product chain allocation. This means that the first goods purchased are the first ones sold. The advantage of this method is it reduces the risk of items becoming obsolete or outdated. Since Johnson & Johnson manufactures thousands of products with expiration dates, it is important for the company to use this resource measure when managing its inventory .

When the company produces its primary products, it also tries to implement end-to-end supply chain optimization. The end-to-end tool is used to eliminate as many “middle layers” as possible to increase efficiency and costs. The company is partnered with approximately 80,000 suppliers, broken down into 30 categories and grouped into 5 families. Johnson & Johnson has enrolled in the “Sustainable Procurement Program” to focus on supplier efficiency with regulatory system assessments. The hope for the company is to become as efficient, effective, and eco-friendly as possible. In 2016, 58% of packaging, 46% of marketing materials, and 61% of furniture were derived from forest materials.

Johnson & Johnson’s resource process begins with obtaining the raw materials and components needed for product configuration by outsourcing from one of its 80,000 suppliers. Once the materials are received, the product is created by one of its manufacturing plants worldwide. The product is sorted in a case, that is then put with others onto a pallet. The pallet is then shipped by truck, boat, or airplane to one of the major 14 distribution centers. From the distribution center, the product’s case is pulled from the pallet and then shipped to the customer warehouse distribution center. The customer distribution center then receives the products and ships them to the appropriate store locations, which finally sells the product to the end consumer.

As an example, Johnson & Johnson sources its raw materials for its 8 Hour Tylenol 24 count pack from its supplier, produces the pack at its manufacturing plant in Puerto Rico, then ships by boat or airfreight to its three major US consumer distribution centers located in Tobyhanna PA, Mooresville IN, and Fontana CA. The distribution center then sends the product to Walgreens’ two distribution centers located in Woodland CA and Marino Valley CA. Walgreens’ warehouse distribution centers further ship the product by truck to its brick and mortar store locations nationwide. The distribution center the product ships from is dependent on its proximity to the retail store. Once receiving the product from the closest geographical warehouse distribution center, the store places the product on the shelf, for a Walgreens customer to purchase. 

Organizational Structure

Since the company has vastly widened geographically to 250 different operating units, it makes sense for Johnson & Johnson to delegate more freedom to its managers and employees in each unit. Johnson & Johnson’s facilities incorporate a decentralized structure with more empowerment for its workers in various levels of management . Implementing a decentralized structure allows each operating unit to adapt to the needs of the people in each differing location. In a decentralized structure, authority is delegated down the organizational chain. Since Johnson & Johnson is so massive with over 130,000 employees, the pyramidal structure is also quite tall. Having a tall organizational structure means that there are various levels of management and reporting relationships. Generally tall, decentralized structures are inefficient because of the lack of communication across multiple segments and levels. However, Johnson & Johnson is one of the few large companies that has used this structure to its advantage by adapting to the local needs in proximity to each operating unit. The company’s diversified organizational structure is affiliated with the Strategic Principles of Johnson & Johnson’s Strategic Framework of a long-term decentralized organizational approach.

The two main advantages of a decentralized structure include higher morale and faster decision-making. Imagine if a low-level manager had to ask its boss’ boss’ boss’ boss for approval on a decision. Increasing empowerment in its various levels of employees improves time management and provides employees with higher levels of satisfaction. The two main disadvantages of a decentralized structure include less top-management control and a weakened corporate image. However, these two disadvantages are in fact advantages for Johnson & Johnson as the company leverages its decentralized structure for a happier working environment which increases its corporate image to the public. It can also be assumed that Alex Gorsky, CEO of Johnson & Johnson, does not want nor has the time capacity to oversee 130,000 employees on his own. Instead, the decentralized structure includes multiple operating units that have different functional and divisional groups within.

For example, the Customer Focused Team in Buffalo Grove IL, is divided between Health & Wellness and Beauty & Personal Care. Within each division, there are different functions and responsibilities for each employee. Both divisions have Customer Development Managers that oversee specific brand lines, as well as Supply Chain Representatives that have the task of managing inventory allocation for specific brand lines. 

Financial Condition

Johnson & Johnson is labeled as one of, “The 10 Most Profitable American Companies in the Fortune 500”. For a company to be profitable, it must sustain substantial cash flow. One of the most relevant indicators of wealth in financial statements is the statement of cash flows . Johnson & Johnson’s statement of cash flows provides crucial insight into the success of the company’s profitability . The statement of cash flows is segmented by operating, investing, and financing activities. Currently for Q2 2017, Johnson & Johnson has $5.77 billion, -$12.25 billion, and -$1.92 billion in operating, investing, and financing activities, respectively. These numbers in Q2 2016, were $4.99 billion, $1.32 billion, and -$1.46 billion in operating, investing, and financing activities, respectively. When comparing the differing activities, the operating and financing segments seem relatively similar to the prior year. However, there is a huge difference between Q2 2017 investing activities (-$12.25 billion) versus prior Q2 2016 investing activities ($1.32 billion). This can be explained by Johnson & Johnson’s quarterly report. In Q2 2017, Johnson & Johnson finalized the acquisition of Actelion Ltd. for $30 billion in cash. The acquisition of a leading biopharmaceutical company such as Actelion Ltd. is substantial compared to the prior-year acquisition of Vogue International LLC for $3.3 billion in cash.

Both purchases appear in the investing activities section under the statement of cash flows. The range of purchases is the main reason behind the difference in investing activities versus the prior year. Nevertheless, this is not a bad sign to be negative in investing activities. In fact, it is a positive sign to see a negative in the investing portion of the statement of cash flows because growing companies spend increased amounts of money on new assets. In this case, Johnson & Johnson bought out Actelion, which is an immense contribution to the company’s assets. For a company to grow substantially, it must acquire more power and ownership in the market. In this case, Johnson & Johnson acquired a much larger company this quarter versus the prior year which will propel growth and profit in the future.

In regard to the other two sections of the statement of cash flows with operating and financing activities, there is not a significant difference between the two quarters. Both sections indicate positive, stable growth for the company. The operating activities increased by $.78 billion versus the prior year. It is always a good sign for the company to attain positive operating activities. This data showcases that Johnson & Johnson is making money off its goods and services. The increase can be explained by new technology and the entrants of new products. In Q2 2017, new products DARZALEX® (daratumumab) and IMBRUVICA® experienced rapid growth, resulting in the increase of operating activities for the quarter. On the other hand, financing activities can fluctuate on positivity versus negativity. The company’s financing activities of Q2 2017 are similar to Q2 2016 in the respect of both requiring the payment of cash dividends and the repurchase of common and preferred stock. This payment and repurchase allow Johnson & Johnson to diminish its debt and advance capital. Having sustainable flows of cash corresponds to Deliver of the Growth Drivers in the Strategic Framework by delivering the best results and maintaining a stable statement of cash flows.

Industry/Competitive Environment

With a highly competitive industry, Johnson & Johnson is focused on the segment that contributes the most to the overall success of the company . Johnson & Johnson’s pharmaceutical industry has reported continued growth for Q2 2017 and amounted to roughly 46% of the company’s total revenue. Pharmaceuticals has continued to account for the largest segment of revenue within the company for the past three years. In the pharmaceutical industry, Johnson & Johnson’s three main competitors include Pfizer, Novartis, and Eli Lilly & Co. Considering the pharmaceutical business includes more than two major competitors owning a significant market share, Johnson & Johnson is considered an oligopoly. An important characteristic of oligopolies is the strategic interdependence between competitors. This statement means that any change in one influences the other- especially when it comes to products or prices. Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Novartis, and Eli Lilly & Co create similar medicines designed to cure and treat specific diseases. Therefore, price reliance is not as much of a focus as the differentiation of advantages and benefits associated with its products. Each company heavily relies on innovation within its own laboratories to outdo rival firms. Introducing new products to the pharmaceutical market can heavily impact competitor profits. One way these four oligopolies expand their market share in the industry is by using their size capacity to facilitate large research and development budgets to create new drugs and medicines.

Over the course of the past ten years, Johnson & Johnson has increased its research and development budget, giving them a competitive advantage over the other three firms. This supports Johnson & Johnson’s Credo to support its doctors and patients in the Foundation section of its Strategic Framework. According to Endpoints News, Johnson & Johnson is #2 on the list of “The 15 Top R&D Spenders in the Global Biopharma Business” in 2016. The company’s research and development budget has increased significantly over the years, where their budget originally was lacking behind competitors at $6.4 billion in 2005. Ever since Johnson & Johnson has made it a priority to improve innovation by increasing the budget. As of 2016, the company’s budget spend was $9.1 billion, followed by #3 Novartis at $8.4 billion, #4 Pfizer at $7.8 billion, and lastly #9 Eli Lilly at $5.4 billion. Allocating more money on research and development provides Johnson & Johnson with a competitive advantage by enabling the company to create more product differentiation with the entrance of new products.

The competitive advantage of an increased research and development budget is shown in Johnson & Johnson’s announcement to introduce at least ten new products by 2019 that each have the potential to generate over $1 billion in sales. The new products also include more than 40 line extensions of existing and new medicines. Another competitive advantage Johnson & Johnson has over competitors Pfizer, Novartis, and Eli Lilly & Co, is the protection of its diversified product portfolio . While the company’s competition has other various pharmaceutical products, Johnson & Johnson has much more intellectual property on its inventions. In “Top 300 Organizations Granted U.S. Patents in 2016”, Johnson & Johnson had 932 patents, whereas Pfizer had 152, Novartis had 247, and Eli Lily did not even make the list at less than 110 patents. The competitive advantage Johnson & Johnson gains from obtaining the most patents for the recent year is its exclusivity to create, use, and sell its products for up to twenty years. There is a direct relationship between its research and development budget with its intellectual property. By prioritizing a larger emphasis on research and development, Johnson & Johnson can produce more innovative processes and patent them, giving the company a step ahead of its competition in the marketplace.

One promise Johnson & Johnson makes time after time is quality assurance. The company strives to achieve the most efficient yet effective products as displayed in Deliver of the Growth Drivers in the Strategic Framework. One way the company executes this is by segmenting its market. It creates products for all ages, genders, and races. It targets each segment by providing a solution to a particular need. For example, teenagers are prone to have more acne- so Johnson & Johnson create products specifically designed for acne treatment and launches “solvemyacne” on its Neutrogena website. “Solvemyacne” includes a personalized questionnaire for a teenager to fill out that ultimately recommends a suitable regimen. This segmentation can be seen across multiple markets, but one market the company is continuously trying to capture and deliver to is its mothers.

Johnson & Johnson assumes that mothers are willing to go the extra mile to provide the best care for their children as stated in their Johnson’s® Baby mission: “We’re helping moms and dads like you safely care for your babies. We know you don’t want to take any risks”. Therefore, Johnson & Johnson, owner of Johnson’s® Baby, creates products of premium quality for those mothers that want the best for their child. The company manufactures all the necessary products a mother may want to be created with the gentlest ingredients. This is supported by “Johnson’s® 5-Step Safety Assurance Process” which constantly tests and evaluates its formula ingredients. The company’s product line contains baby shampoos, oils, body washes, wipes, powders, lotions, etc. Johnson & Johnson knows mothers will pay for the premium product, and therefore designs its products to include the purest, eco-friendly, non-chemical ingredients, that are proven to be the safest and least harmful to children.

Since Johnson & Johnson labels its products to maintain the “highest standards”, its prices reflect this as well. Johnson’s® Baby products are set at a premium yet affordable price, usually higher than private-label or other generic brands. The company utilizes its scientific development and research to provide the safest products while still sustaining an affordable price. Known as cost-based pricing, Johnson’s® Baby products require higher retail prices due to increased material costs associated with better quality. An example of this can be seen with Johnson’s® Baby Head-to-Toe Wash Original Formula 15 oz priced at $5.49 on Walgreens.com, versus Walgreens private-label brand Well Beginnings Baby Wash 15 oz priced at $3.99. The difference in pricing between the private-label brand and the name brand is evident, but not extensive. The company also captures the mother market by using psychological pricing, which sets its product at price points of .49 or .99. This deceives the mother into thinking she is getting the item for $5 when $5.49 versus $5.50 is essentially the same price. However, if the pricing was $5.50 instead, the orders would not be sufficient as the mother then perceives the price as more expensive at $6.

Johnson & Johnson guarantees product placement with its Johnson’s® Baby products to further incentivize mothers to purchase its items. First, the company confirms its products are readily available in the baby section of every large major retail store. These stores include nationwide locations of Walgreens, CVS, Rite-Aid, Kroger, Target, and Walmart. The company ensures its products are an option for the mother. To begin with, the company pushes for product purchasing by implementing on-shelf availability. The company negotiates thousands of dollars to place its baby care products at eye level and within reach on the shelf, for both the mother and the child. This product placement is essential to its marketing technique. By placing the product at eye level for the mother, it is the first baby brand the mother looks at when debating a purchase. Secondly, by placing the product at eye level for the child, the child is then able to grab the product and ask his/her mom to buy it. Allocating on-shelf availability in an accessible manner motivates the mother to purchase the product, whether that be by the decision herself or the pressure from her child.

Although Johnson & Johnson’s pricing is at a reasonable premium level, it allows for the expense of discounts and bundles. The markup on pricing gives the company wiggle room to promote its products at lower prices. Promotions include BOGOs (buy one get one), coupons, or FSIs (free-standing insert). All three promotions lessen the purchasing prices of the items. If vendors expense a promotional spend, the price can be less than the generic brand. This can be seen with the same Johnson’s® Baby Head-to-Toe Wash Original Formula 15 oz priced at $5.49 that currently has a $2 off coupon. This coupon brings the retail price down to $3.49, which is less than the generic Walgreens Well Beginnings Baby Wash 15 oz priced at $3.99. In this case, Johnson’s® Baby is utilizing a high-low pricing strategy, where it is cheaper to buy the name brand than to buy the generic brand when on promotion. Promoting discounts and deals builds a relationship that returns mothers back to the Johnson’s® Baby brand and stimulates growth in the company.

Summary and Conclusion

As shown, Johnson & Johnson continues to outpace the market by delivering maximum benefit across the globe. From the organization’s mission to its size and structure, Johnson & Johnson has proven to be one of the leading healthcare providers in the consumer, pharmaceutical, and medical devices industries. Back in 1866, brothers Robert, James, and Edward Johnson set the foundation of what was at the time small family business. Today, this business has expanded worldwide and makes an impact on more than a billion lives every day. This advancement of Johnson & Johnson for the past 130 years can be attributed to its core Strategic Framework of the Foundation, Strategic Principles, and Growth Drivers for ultimate success.

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How Johnson & Johnson Made Hard Decisions During Covid

• Joanne Waldstreicher

The company had to decide: Should a drug designed to treat HIV patients be diverted to people with Covid-19 instead?

During a crisis, it’s sometimes hard to pause. There is a natural predisposition to act—to want to help, to jump in and do everything one can. But it’s important to remember that we may end up doing more harm than good if we act too quickly, without first pausing to consider the objective rigor of the data underpinning decision-making as well as the broader impact of the decisions we make. In early 2020, media reports indicated that an antiviral drug produced by Johnson & Johnson that was used to treat people with HIV might be effective against COVID-19. Orders for the medicine surged beyond what the pharmaceutical company could produce. Instead of ramping up production, though, the company paused and followed a specific playbook for responding to crisis. The company worked with internal and external independent experts, transparently laid out and shared the scientific data, and established and globally applied an ethical framework, all to ensure their decision-making process was rational, ethical and equitable. The benefits of this review process were born out months later when clinical studies on HIV antivirals in patients with COVID-19 showed that the drugs were not effective against COVID-19 in people. Acting hastily to fill the influx of orders early in the pandemic would not have helped patients with COVID-19. In addition, diverting the supply would have harmed those who needed the medicines for HIV.

In early 2020, we at Johnson & Johnson found ourselves with an unusual problem: There were too many orders for an antiviral drug used to treat people with HIV. The demand was coming not from HIV patients but from doctors on the front lines of the Covid-19 pandemic. Early media reports indicated that the drug might be effective against that disease, and orders for the medicine surged.

• JW Joanne Waldstreicher , M.D., is Chief Medical Officer, Johnson & Johnson. In this role, she has oversight across pharmaceuticals, devices and consumer products for safety, epidemiology, clinical and regulatory operations transformation, collaborations on ethical science, and technology and R&D policies, including those related to clinical trial transparency and compassionate access. She chairs the R&D Development Pipeline Review Committee for The Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson, and supports the Device and Consumer Development Committees. Joanne is also a faculty affiliate of the Division of Medical Ethics, Department of Population Health, New York University School of Medicine. Joanne combines broad experience in science and medicine with a passion for advancing transparency and ethics, with a goal of improving the lives of patients and consumers worldwide.

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Johnson & Johnson wins a key court battle in baby powder case

Scott Horsley

Johnson & Johnson's baby powder is displayed on a table in this photo illustration. A federal judge has allowed Johnson & Johnson's spinoff of a unit to proceed with a controversial bankruptcy. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images hide caption

Johnson & Johnson's baby powder is displayed on a table in this photo illustration. A federal judge has allowed Johnson & Johnson's spinoff of a unit to proceed with a controversial bankruptcy.

A federal judge has allowed a company spun off by Johnson & Johnson to proceed with a controversial bankruptcy, despite complaints from thousands of people who say they were harmed by the consumer product giant's baby powder and who could now be denied a chance to sue.

J&J created the spinoff company, LTL Management, under a Texas law last fall , while facing some 38,000 lawsuits from people who say its baby powder was contaminated with asbestos, causing cancer and other ailments.

J&J, which also makes products such as Tylenol and Band-Aid, assigned legal liability for the complaints to the spinoff company, which immediately filed for bankruptcy — a maneuver dubbed the "Texas two-step."

Critics challenged the bankruptcy as a bad-faith effort to shield J&J itself from responsibility for an allegedly harmful product.

"The bankruptcy code was never intended to be abused in this way by massively profitable corporations as a means to delay or prevent cancer victims from having their day in court," said Jon Ruckdeschel, an attorney who represents some of the people pursuing J&J.

J&J is using a bankruptcy maneuver to block lawsuits over baby powder cancer claims

Judge acknowledges the ruling will frustrate plaintiffs.

Judge Michael Kaplan ruled Friday that LTL can proceed with the bankruptcy, leaving individual lawsuits on hold.

Kaplan acknowledged the frustration that would cause, but concluded bankruptcy offers a more efficient remedy for those who claim they were harmed by J&J.

"The Court is aware that its decision today will be met with much angst and concern," Kaplan wrote in his decision. "The Court remains steadfast in its belief that justice will best be served by expeditiously providing critical compensation through a court-supervised, fair, and less costly settlement trust arrangement."

Johnson & Johnson called the ruling "a positive development and a step forward to reaching a global resolution" of the lawsuits.

"We continue to stand behind the safety of Johnson's Baby Powder, which is safe, does not contain asbestos and does not cause cancer," the company said in a statement.

J&J stopped selling baby powder made with talc in the U.S. and Canada in 2020, saying consumers in those countries preferred a version made with corn starch. The company still sells talc-based baby powder in other countries.

Johnson & Johnson's consumer products include Band-Aid, Johnson's baby powder and Tylenol. Mike Derer/AP hide caption

Johnson & Johnson's consumer products include Band-Aid, Johnson's baby powder and Tylenol.

The controversial Texas two-step maneuver

While the bankruptcy process has been used for years to resolve large-scale product liability cases involving asbestos, silicone breast implants and birth control devices, the Texas two-step process is relatively new.

It's controversial because it allows a company to limit which of its assets are available to settle complaints.

"In an extreme case, a company that's facing a lot of litigation could stick all the litigation exposure — all of those liabilities — into one entity and stick everything else into the other entity, and the [Texas] statute doesn't do anything to stop that," said David Skeel, a bankruptcy expert at the University of Pennsylvania.

A judge temporarily halts baby powder cancer lawsuits against Johnson & Johnson

Appeals to the judge's ruling are likely.

Plaintiffs pursuing J&J promised to appeal Judge Kaplan's ruling.

"We are disappointed that J&J's stooge 'bankruptcy' filing for its fall-guy subsidiary LTL Management was not dismissed," Ruckdeschel said. "Americans suffering from cancer caused by J&J's asbestos-tainted talc have a constitutional right to have a jury decide their case."

Skeel notes that J&J has a market valuation of more than $430 billion and a credit rating higher than the U.S. government's. He suspects if the company is successful at limiting its liability through bankruptcy, copycats will soon follow.

"You could see companies start to push the envelope," Skeel said. "Companies that don't have thousands of lawsuits but maybe 10 lawsuits. It does have enormous implications for liability exposure going forward."

Some members of Congress want to rewrite the bankruptcy code to limit maneuvers like this.

"We need to close this loophole for good," Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said earlier this month. "Bankruptcy is supposed to be a good-faith way to accept responsibility, pay one's debts as best you can, and then receive a second chance, not a Texas two-step, get-0ut-of-jail-free card for some of the wealthiest corporations on earth like Johnson & Johnson."

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How Johnson & Johnson’s innovative supply chain technology is helping transform how we work—and live

The company now has more lighthouse designations than any other—a marker of its excellence in manufacturing innovation. learn how johnson & johnson sites are improving how and when we get the healthcare products and services we need and serving as a beacon to other manufacturers worldwide..

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Every day, more and more new technologies that seem straight out of a sci-fi movie—from intelligent robots to self-driving cars—are making headlines.

These advances signal the beginning of what’s known as a Fourth Industrial Revolution that will change the way we live and work. While the Third Industrial Revolution brought digital capabilities to billions of people, the Fourth is characterized by a range of cutting-edge technologies that impact all economies and industries and open up new career paths for science, technology, engineering, mathematics, manufacturing and design professionals.

For companies around the world, identifying and implementing these new technologies—innovations that have the power to affect every aspect of business, from manufacturing, distribution and operations to customer experience—has become a priority. But some have been quicker to adapt than others.

Johnson & Johnson was awarded two new Lighthouse designations, bringing the company total to seven Lighthouse designations across all sectors: Pharmaceutical, Medical Devices and Consumer Health—more than any other company has.

The World Economic Forum established the Global Lighthouse Network in collaboration with McKinsey & Co. in 2018 to accelerate a more comprehensive and inclusive adoption of these technologies in manufacturing. To date, 90 manufacturers from a variety of industry sectors have received Lighthouse designations for their use of Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies to increase efficiency and productivity, in tandem with environmental stewardship.

Just as lighthouses have been used to aid navigation for thousands of years, the Lighthouse recipients are world leaders who’ve adopted and integrated technologies that the World Economic Forum has tapped to show others the way forward.

Johnson & Johnson was recently awarded two new Lighthouse designations: one for its approach to end-to-end customer connectivity in its orthopedics business and one for its Vision Care order-fulfillment operations in London. That brings the company total to seven Lighthouse designations across all sectors: Pharmaceutical, Medical Devices and Consumer Health—more than any other company has.

“The main factor of success is to improve the end-to-end customer experience,” says Kathy Wengel, Executive Vice President & Chief Global Supply Chain Officer for Johnson & Johnson. “Advanced manufacturing technologies contribute to greater efficiencies and connectivity across Johnson & Johnson, while sustaining our commitment to quality, enhancing sustainability benefits for the planet and improving cycle time and visibility for the patients, consumers and customers we are privileged to serve.”

Keep reading to see how the company’s two newly designated Lighthouse facilities, along with the Johnson & Johnson DePuy Synthes site in Suzhou, China, a 2020 award recipient, are not only leading in creating innovative technologies but also sharing what they’ve learned with others.

Johnson & Johnson DePuy Synthes Advance Case Management in Bridgewater, New Jersey

Received Lighthouse designation for: implementing a fully digital platform that ensures that orthopedic surgeons receive the right mix of applicable devices and tools for each patient, minimizing waste and expediting set-up time in the operating room

A digital platform at DePuy Synthes in Bridgewater, New Jersey, resulted in a dramatic reduction in instrument trays required by orthopedic surgeons in the operating room.

Preparation for surgical cases is complex, and inefficient processes drive higher healthcare costs. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, things got even more challenging: Staffing shortages, supply chain disruption and restricted access all impacted efficient case coordination. In the company’s joint-reconstruction business , this created a perfect storm of events, making it harder to have the right product show up at the right time for the right patient.

But Johnson & Johnson’s Supply Chain Customer Solutions team is working to solve these case-coordination challenges. Its Advance Case Management (ACM) platform utilizes a mix of image-based and artificial intelligence algorithms to predict the most likely product range required for surgeons to do primary joint-replacement surgeries.

“Because ACM digitizes the process, there are fewer touchpoints focused on logistics and there’s more time spent supporting customer needs and patient care,” says Jean Nycz, Head of Supply Chain Customer Solutions. “We can predict the sizes of implants required with an accuracy level in the 90%-plus range, plus or minus one size for knee surgeries. Knowing the most likely sizes has fueled a more efficient operating room for surgeons and alleviated some pain points during such an unprecedented time,” says Nycz, who adds that the ACM has also led to up to a 60% reduction in both instrument trays required for cases and instrument-sterilization costs.

Given the trend toward many medical procedures shifting from inpatient to outpatient, these efficiencies have come at just the right time.

“Many procedures that were happening in the hospital are now shifting to ambulatory surgery centers,” says Nycz. “These centers are space-constrained. They don’t have any place for excess implants and instruments, and they rely on accurate and efficient processes to ensure a successful outcome.”

The Bridgewater Lighthouse designation will allow other companies to learn how to digitize processes that were labor-intensive and bring products to customers in a more efficient way.

Johnson & Johnson Vision Care Order-Fulfillment Operations in London

Received Lighthouse designation for: transforming the customer experience by creating a one-stop shop for order management

A highly efficient system at Johnson & Johnson Vision Care in London significantly reduced the company’s carbon footprint, while maintaining its service levels.

The pandemic has changed the way we shop for everything from clothing to contact lenses . Today, people expect a personalized experience and a quicker response time from companies than in the past, whether they’re calling in with questions or shopping online.

Case in point: “A big part of what we ship—up to 25%—is directly to consumers,” says Gaspar Zuniga, Vice President, Supply Chain for Johnson & Johnson Vision. “And the trend accelerated when people couldn’t get their contact lenses in person.”

These changes drove the need for a dynamic virtual call center that relies on advanced technology such as intelligence-based call routing and auto answer. As a result of the improved customer experience, the score of Johnson & Johnson’s Customer Satisfaction Survey jumped 6.4%, going from 85.5% in 2017 to 91.9% in 2020, second only to Amazon.

As a result of the improved customer experience, the score of Johnson & Johnson’s Customer Satisfaction Survey jumped 6.4%, going from 85.5% in 2017 to 91.9% in 2020, second only to Amazon.

Another new system ensures that repeat customers never see a “sold out” message when they log on to order their contact lenses, thanks to a technology that anticipates when they’ll reorder and reserves lenses just for them.

These are just some of the improvements that helped earn the London facility a Lighthouse designation—an honor that provides Johnson & Johnson Vision Care’s supply chain with “a significant sense of pride,” says Zuniga. “We’re invested to deliver on our purpose: to see better, connect better and live better.”

Another source of pride: When Johnson & Johnson Vision Care showcased an end-to-end operating model that encompasses customer service, manufacturing and distribution during a World Economic Forum livestream earlier this year, there was just one question from others in the Lighthouse Network: How could they put this technology to use in their own operations?

“It takes a lot of work to connect it,” Zuniga says. “As a company, we started talking about this seven years ago, and it’s great to see it all come together.”

Johnson & Johnson DePuy Synthes in Suzhou, China

Received Lighthouse designation for: creating an integrated digital platform that improves interconnectivity and efficiency and benefits the company’s large-scale operations

The Johnson & Johnson Medical Ltd. campus in Suzhou, China

A decade or so after the 2006 opening of the Johnson & Johnson Medical campus in Suzhou, the DePuy Synthes factory there, which manufactures orthopedic surgical products, including joint-reconstruction implants, identified the need to produce and distribute its products more efficiently to better service surgeons and patients around the world.

As a result, in 2020, Johnson & Johnson received its first Lighthouse designation in China for its efforts to successfully incorporate advanced technologies at DePuy Synthes Suzhou while protecting the environment.

To enable real-time, interactive and accurate manufacturing processes, Johnson & Johnson employees transformed and improved siloed technologies by leveraging digital analytics to optimize productivity, improve prediction of customer demand and make the supply chain more agile. As a result, productivity increased by 15% at DePuy Synthes Suzhou.

“Creating such a platform has helped us to upgrade manufacturing and end-to-end supply chain capabilities, maximize efficiency and competitiveness at scale and drive business performance improvements,” says Roy Tong, Director of Engineering, DePuy Synthes Suzhou.

A new distribution center warehouse opened at the DePuy Synthes Suzhou campus in 2021 that accelerates the site’s pace at supplying cutting-edge 3D printed surgical products to the Chinese market. Shaving time off order delivery goes a long way in meeting customer expectations, especially in Asia, when orders can actually be delivered the day an order is placed. Eliminating the time required to transport products from the manufacturing plant to a separate distribution facility means that DePuy Synthes Suzhou can serve both surgeons and, in turn, their patients, more expeditiously.

Says Julia Chen, General Manager of DePuy Synthes China: “The growing end-to-end capabilities at the campus are enabling a better experience for our customers and patients.”

More ways the company is improving the future of health around the world

More from Johnson & Johnson

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Building climate-resilient health clinics

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Johnson & Johnson Case Study

Johnson & Johnson sells consumer health, pharmaceutical and bioinformatics products in more than 175 countries. Over 270 companies operate under the Johnson & Johnson brand in 60 countries worldwide. The IT division of the global enterprise turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) when it decided to move to the cloud and redefine its global IT strategy. The company currently leverages the AWS Cloud to run 120 applications and for its big data architecture allowing it to complete highly intensive and complex data modeling. Next, the company plans to triple the number of applications it hosts on AWS and launch 25,000 Amazon Workspaces cloud-based desktops for its consultants and employees to use around the globe.

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The Renewed, Curious Case Study of Johnson & Johnson

After vaccination concerns.

Inspiration meets innovation at Brandweek , the ultimate marketing experience. Join industry luminaries, rising talent and strategic experts in Phoenix, Arizona this September 23–26 to assess challenges, develop solutions and create new pathways for growth. Register early to save .

Perhaps one of the most iconic brand images from my childhood is the yellow bottle of Johnson & Johnson (J&J) baby shampoo that is distinctly labeled “No more tears.” Founded in 1886, Johnson & Johnson has a long brand history with a focus on healthcare which started with the production of antiseptic gauze and bandages.

From a consumer perspective, it is often difficult to separate perceptions about a brand which stem from its different product lines. Currently, J&J has a wide and varied product mix that spans consumer health products, medical devices and pharmaceutical products. In recent weeks, J&J has been featured in headlines for its Covid-19 vaccine, developed under the Janssen Pharmaceuticals company but still bearing the brand name. The vaccine distribution is currently paused in the United States as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) investigates symptoms related to the vaccine including blood clots while the rollout has been approved to restart in Europe . But a recent YouGov poll suggests a large drop in the perception of safety of the brand’s vaccine after the rollout was stopped.

With over a 130-year history in an industry sector strongly connected to consumer safety and welfare, J&J offers a unique brand case study. In 1982, J&J’s leadership launched a major recall and offered a reward related to the tampering of Extra-Strength Tylenol . Although this tragic incident seemed isolated to the Chicago area, J&J took a more proactive and wide-scale response to prevent further harm. The consumer-centric response is touted as a commendable strategy that allowed J&J to maintain consumers’ trust and quickly reclaim market share in the analgesic market. J&J faced more scrutiny with a Tylenol recall in 2009 and allegations about its talcum baby powder . However, its commitment to social impact garnered it a top spot in The Wall Street Journal’s ranking of the world’s most sustainably managed companies.

So, what impact does the halt in J&J’s vaccine mean for its brand equity? In their seminal paper in Management Science, economist and strategist Dierickx and Karen Cool (1989) describe an organization’s ability to develop a “stock” of assets which grows from strategic investment “inflows” and is reduced by “outflows” (akin to a bathtub that can be filled and also spring leaks). An example is a company’s “stock” of knowledge and intellectual capital. Over time, this knowledge can become outdated and its value as an asset reduced (“outflow”). However, the intellectual capital can be “refilled” with R&D spending. Taking a similar, although not identical, framework, brand equity is an asset that can be diminished or replenished by a brand’s actions (e.g., advertising) and the actions of other agents including media coverage, consumers’ social media chatter, and tangible consumer market outcomes. While the halt in vaccine rollout is surely an “outflow” from J&J’ stock of brand equity, its involvement in the urgent battle against Covid-19 is an “inflow.”

In the long term, the Johnson & Johnson brand will be most strongly impacted by how closely the organization’s actions, cumulatively, align with its brand credo. The first few lines of the credo are: “We believe our first responsibility is to the patients, doctors and nurses, to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services. In meeting their needs , everything we do must be of high quality.” Actions that demonstrate a commitment to these constituents, even in the face of obstacles, are likely to refill J&J stock of brand equity.

Debika Sihi

Debika Sihi is an associate professor of business at Southwestern University and is a member of our Adweek Academic Council.

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Johnson & Johnson: The Tylenol Tragedy

By: Stephen A. Greyser

In October 1982, Johnson & Johnson was confronted with a major crisis when seven deaths were attributed to poisoned Tylenol. The case reviews the facts as known a week after the incident occurred,…

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In October 1982, Johnson & Johnson was confronted with a major crisis when seven deaths were attributed to poisoned Tylenol. The case reviews the facts as known a week after the incident occurred, and raises a wide range of questions regarding consumer behavior, corporate responsibility, and competitive reaction.

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Johnson & Johnson and a New War on Consumer Protection

By Casey Cep

God gives you only one body, Deane Berg always said, so you’d better take care of the one you’ve got. A physician assistant at the veterans’ hospital in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, she knew that spotting between periods wasn’t unusual for a forty-nine-year-old woman, but she went to the doctor anyway. Her two daughters had already lost their father to lung cancer, so Berg wanted to stick around.

Just perimenopause, the doctor concluded after a cursory examination. Probably a blood clot, the nurse practitioner told her when a subsequent ultrasound showed something on an ovary. “It’s not going to be cancer,” the gynecological surgeon said before removing both ovaries on the day after Christmas in 2006. But, when Berg went for her follow-up, she read the words on the pathology report before the surgeon had a chance to break the news: serous carcinoma. She cried, and the surgeon did, too. She would now need a full hysterectomy, chemotherapy, and a great deal of luck. Every year, around twenty thousand women are given a diagnosis of ovarian cancer in the United States, and more than half that many will die of the disease.

Berg told herself that twenty-six years of caring for patients might help her get through the treatments ahead. But her experience with veterans’ port-a-caths did not make it any less painful to have them implanted in her own abdomen and chest; nausea and headaches were no more manageable because she’d counselled others through them. And nothing prepares a person for losing her hair and much of her hearing or developing nerve damage in her hands and feet or having her teeth crack from chemo. Weak and immunocompromised, Berg left her job at the hospital, which meant she had more time to study the handouts about ovarian cancer that nurses had given her when she was diagnosed.

One of those pamphlets was distributed by Gilda’s Club, a group founded by friends of the comedian Gilda Radner, who died of the disease in 1989, when she was only forty-two. The pamphlet included a list of risk factors, which Berg went through one by one. No, she didn’t have a family history of reproductive cancer; no, she hadn’t struggled with infertility and had never used fertility drugs; no, she had never had cancer before; no, she had never had an unhealthy diet or been overweight. Then she came to a section about talcum powder. After reading it, she went to look at the big container of Johnson & Johnson body powder she kept in her bathroom to use after daily showers and the little bottle of Johnson & Johnson baby powder she took with her whenever she travelled. Both listed talc as an ingredient.

Berg immediately posted a message on the forum of the Ovarian Cancer Research Alliance, asking if any other women thought their cancer might have been caused by talcum powder. Only two people replied. The first was a cancer researcher in Illinois who had been trying for more than a decade to get the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to warn American customers that talc could be a carcinogen. The second was R. Allen Smith, Jr., an attorney in Mississippi. He was interested in talking to her about a lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson; she wasn’t convinced he was a real lawyer.

Smith did in fact practice law, and, years before, his father, a doctor, had tipped him off to a contentious debate over the safety of talc—one that continues to this day. A study published in 2020 in the Journal of the American Medical Association , which pooled data from four earlier long-term observational studies and involved a quarter of a million women, found no statistically significant link between talc and ovarian cancer. But, as its authors noted, the underlying studies did not always distinguish between powders that contained talc and those which did not, and were not consistent in asking participants how often or for how long they’d powdered themselves. Many other studies, meanwhile, found a significantly increased risk of ovarian cancer in women who used talc for feminine hygiene—in their underwear, on their sanitary napkins, for storing their diaphragms.

Determining the etiology of diseases is difficult, especially when it comes to cancers, which often have long latency periods and multifactorial causes. But the evidence against talc had grown substantial enough by the time Berg was diagnosed that many U.S. manufacturers, including the makers of crayons, condoms, and surgical gloves, had erred on the side of caution and stopped using it in their products. Why hadn’t Johnson & Johnson done the same, when an alternative, cornstarch, was cheap, abundant, and safer?

Johnson & Johnson is one of America’s most trusted companies, and as Berg moved through her cycles of chemotherapy she kept thinking about a slogan for its body powder: “A sprinkle a day helps keep odor away.” For more than thirty years, she had taken that advice, applying the powder between her legs to prevent chafing. But that powder wasn’t like her chemo drugs: their side effects were awful, but they were keeping her alive. The powder felt, instead, like an unnecessary gamble, one she thought other people should be warned about.

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All along, Berg had worried about her daughters—not only how they’d fare if she died but whether her diagnosis meant they had a greater inherited risk of cancer. In 2007, to find out, she underwent genetic testing and learned that she had neither of the two main mutations that increase the odds of developing reproductive cancers. Two years later, she had her ovarian tissue tested, and the pathologist found talc in one ovary. Shortly afterward, with her cancer in remission, she decided to sue, in what became the first baby-powder lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson to ever make it to trial.

Almost every American, from nursery to deathbed, uses Johnson & Johnson products: baby shampoo, Band-Aids, Neosporin, Rogaine, and O.B. tampons; Tylenol, Imodium, Motrin, and Zyrtec; Listerine mouthwash and Nicorette gum; Aveeno lotion and Neutrogena cleanser; catheters and stents for the heart; balloons for dilating the ear, nose, and throat; hemostats and staples; ankle, hip, shoulder, and knee replacements; breast implants; Acuvue contact lenses. But what few of those consumers grasped until a series of baby-powder cases began to go to trial was that, for decades, the company had known that its powders could contain asbestos, among the world’s deadliest carcinogens.

Slippery to the touch and soft enough to flake with your fingernail, the mineral talc is found all around the world, in deposits that can be more than a billion years old. Such deposits are sometimes laced with actinolite, anthophyllite, chrysotile, and tremolite. These accessory minerals, better known in their fibrous form as asbestos, grow alongside talc like weeds in a geological garden. As early as 1971, Johnson & Johnson scientists had become aware of reports about asbestos in talc. They and others also worried about a connection between cancer and talc itself, whether or not it contained asbestos. By the time of Berg’s diagnosis, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer had designated talc containing fibrous particles a carcinogen and the genital application of any talc powder possibly carcinogenic. The F.D.A. had safety concerns, too, but its authority over products like baby powder was and remains, in the words of Ann Witt, a former senior official at the agency, “so minimal it’s laughable.”

Johnson & Johnson has always insisted, including to this magazine, that its baby powder is “safe, asbestos-free, and does not cause cancer”; however, a 2016 investigation by Bloomberg and subsequent revelations by Reuters and the New York Times , based in part on documents that surfaced because of discovery in suits like Berg’s, exposed the possible health risk related to its powders. Following those reports, tens of thousands of people filed suits against the company, alleging that its products had caused their cancers. In 2020, after juries awarded some of those plaintiffs damages that collectively exceeded billions of dollars, Johnson & Johnson announced that it would no longer supply the talc-based version of its product to American stores.

And then, quietly, the company embraced a strategy to circumvent juries entirely. Deploying a legal maneuver first used by Koch Industries, Johnson & Johnson, a company valued at nearly half a trillion dollars, with a credit rating higher than that of the United States government, declared bankruptcy. Because of that move, the fate of forty thousand current lawsuits and the possibility of future claims by cancer victims or their survivors now rests with a single bankruptcy judge in the company’s home state, New Jersey. If Johnson & Johnson prevails and, as Berg puts it, “weasels its way out of everything,” the case could usher in a new era in which the government has diminished power to enforce consumer-protection laws, citizens don’t get to make their case before a jury of their peers when those laws fail, and even corporations with long histories of documented harm will get to decide how much, if anything, they owe their victims.

When the Civil War ended, Robert Wood Johnson was a lowly drug clerk in Manhattan with a knack for trading on the medical bona fides of others. In his first business venture, with a prosperous pharmacist named George Seabury, Johnson appropriated the name of Joseph Lister, the British aseptic-surgery pioneer, to sell a line of sterile sutures and gauze. Later, he split from Seabury so that he and two of his brothers could incorporate as Johnson & Johnson. The company plastered the red cross of Clara Barton’s humanitarian organization on its product line and refused to stop, even when Congress tried to prohibit anyone but the Red Cross from using the emblem. (Eventually, the company went so far as to sue the nonprofit for trademark infringement. The judge was not impressed.)

To further burnish its scientific image, Johnson & Johnson gave away millions of medical pamphlets that doubled as advertisements for its products. One pamphlet issued in 1902, titled “Hygiene in Maternity,” marketed at-home birth kits, which included sanitary soap, abdominal binders, umbilical tape, sterile bags, and a recent innovation: baby powder, created by Johnson & Johnson’s first scientific director, Frederick Barnett Kilmer. He had realized that talc could be used to soothe irritations caused by adhesive bandages and diaper rash. Kilmer’s powder went to market in square cannisters that stayed put when lively infants kicked them; for a while, the packaging featured a picture of Robert Wood Johnson’s granddaughter.

Despite accounting for a tiny percentage of Johnson & Johnson’s annual revenue, baby powder provided entrée for the brand into households around the world and was foundational to its family-friendly reputation. According to one company estimate, between 1930 and 1990, baby powder was used on roughly half the children born in the United States. A marketing PowerPoint from 1998 described the baby division as the company’s “#1 asset,” critical to the “deep personal trust” that consumers had for the brand over all. So popular was the baby powder that the company had bought talc mines to bolster and control its supply, selling off some of the talc for use in roofing and paint products and keeping the rest for use on humans. The company’s mines were in Vermont, where many of the talc deposits are thought to contain asbestos. (Geologists working for the state noted the ubiquity of asbestos there as early as 1872.)

Asbestos, which is considered dangerous even in small amounts, is found throughout the world, in building materials and brake pads, and it can also exist, unknown to people, in background levels in their water and soil. It is tricky to detect in talcum products, because the fibres are small and can closely resemble talc. Since the nineteen-forties, Johnson & Johnson has tried to monitor its supply chain, regularly testing talc from its mines and from its other suppliers. Most of the tests it commissioned found no asbestos. However, according to internal documents, dozens of tests have found minerals such as tremolite, chrysotile, and actinolite—which, in certain forms, constitute asbestos—in the company’s talc.

In a statement to The New Yorker , Johnson & Johnson denied that internal testing found “asbestos in talc that was being used by the company.” But company scientists were concerned about the diseases related to asbestos and talc. As one of them, Dr. T. M. Thompson, noted in a 1969 memo to a senior executive, pediatricians had been “expressing concern over the possibility of the adverse effects on the lungs of babies or mothers who might inhale any substantial amounts of our talc formulations.” He warned his colleagues, “It is not inconceivable that we could become involved in litigation in which pulmonary fibrosis or other changes might be rightfully or wrongfully attributed to inhalation of our powder formulations. It might be that someone in the Law Department should be consulted with regard to the defensibility of our position in the event that such a situation could ever arise.”

It wasn’t only pulmonary diseases that were of interest to the company scientists. In 1971, a team of researchers in Wales analyzing the tissue of reproductive-cancer patients found that most of their cervical and ovarian tumors had talc in them. Their study, published in the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology , was the first to suggest a link between talc and ovarian cancer. Within a month, Johnson & Johnson executives sent employees to Cardiff to meet with its authors. According to company minutes of that meeting, the Welsh researchers speculated that the talc might have spread to the reproductive organs via the bloodstream after women inhaled it, or entered their reproductive tracts through their vaginas. Johnson & Johnson got some of the team’s tissue samples to do further testing. Scientists hired by the company not only confirmed the presence of talc in the samples; some of them found asbestos in the tumors as well. (Johnson & Johnson maintains that the samples could have been contaminated.)

In that era, Johnson & Johnson was conducting other research on talc as well. Beginning in 1967, the company funded several experiments on prisoners, mostly Black men at Holmesburg Prison, in Philadelphia. Internal company records detail how the subjects were given blisters with a chemical-burn agent, then had their wounds dusted three times a day with talc. Four years later, other men were injected with talc and two forms of asbestos so that the company could measure the inflammation they developed after exposure. As Allen Hornblum documented in the 1998 book “Acres of Skin,” those talc studies were only some of the experiments Johnson & Johnson carried out on prisoners. Others included paying inmates “five dollars per wound” for testing the absorbency and adhesiveness of the company’s dressings and paying them three dollars each to have shampoo dropped in their eyes regularly for twenty-four hours to help the company perfect the formula for its signature baby shampoo, No More Tears.

Eventually, some in the company began to worry that talc posed a reputational risk. In 2008, the year before Berg filed her lawsuit, its global creative director, Todd True, sent an e-mail to colleagues with the subject line “Best for baby.” He asked, “Have we done any research to determine the potential negative impact to our brand or best for baby strategy by maintaining this ingredient? Have we looked at replacing talc with cornstarch for our base powder as other brands have? What’s the value in maintaining talc under baby aside from cost?” Three days later, he wrote again to suggest that the company “simply replace the talc ingredient” in its baby products. Doing so, he added, “seems like an easy fix and win.”

But Johnson & Johnson did not change the central ingredient in its baby powder. It changed its marketing strategy. In the sixties, as pediatricians began worrying about the suffocation risks that talcum powder posed for babies and major studies were finding asbestos to be carcinogenic even in small doses, Johnson & Johnson was pitching its powder aggressively to adults. One advertisement featured Hammerin’ Harmon Killebrew, the Minnesota Twins Hall of Famer, saying, “Mama taught me it takes more than a towel to really get dry.” The company also introduced a “deodorant body powder,” Shower to Shower, eventually packing it in pink bottles for women and promising “a freshness that stays with you until you wash it away.” In 2007, after the International Agency for Research on Cancer issued its warning about talc powder, Johnson & Johnson had a new focus, according to internal marketing presentations, on “overweight” and “African-American” consumers, then more broadly on “ethnic consumers,” which it pursued through giveaways at churches, beauty parlors, and barbershops in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. In 2010, the company targeted “curvy Southern women 18-49 skewing African American,” emphasizing that powder helps with body odor and chafing in hot climates. And even after Johnson & Johnson pulled its talc-based powder from U.S. and Canadian markets, in 2020, the company kept selling it elsewhere, including China, Indonesia, and Pakistan, as well as in India, where using the American brand has become a status symbol for women and teen-age girls. Only a few weeks ago did Johnson & Johnson finally announce that it was getting out of the talc business altogether. Not right away, though. Rather than pull its product from shelves, it will simply sell the talc-based powder overseas into next year, until it’s gone.

Johnson & Johnson’s baby powder is classified by the F.D.A. as a cosmetic, a type of product over which the agency has extremely limited authority. In the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act, a document of more than eight hundred pages, only two pages address cosmetics, a category that encompasses not just lipstick, mascara, moisturizer, anti-aging serums, and everything else in the makeup aisle but also products that most Americans use every day, including toothpaste, deodorant, and shampoo.

The responsibility for regulating the eighty-five-billion-dollar cosmetics industry falls to the F.D.A.’s Division of Cosmetics, which has just thirty employees and an annual budget of less than ten million dollars: a rounding error in the agency’s six-billion-dollar budget and a twentieth of what it spends regulating food and drugs for pets. The marginal status of cosmetics at the F.D.A. stems in part from the difference between acute and chronic risk: it’s easier to defer regulation for products that cause injury or death only after years of cumulative exposure. But another reason cosmetics are barely regulated is that the industry has successfully fought for more than eighty years to keep Congress from updating the rules that cosmetic companies must abide by. Today, such companies are not legally required to test their products for safety before selling them. They do not have to register with the F.D.A. or provide ingredient statements, and they do not have to produce their safety records for scrutiny or report adverse events, whether rashes or headaches or early puberty or even cancer. If a cosmetic product is life-threatening, the agency cannot recall that product or suspend production; it can only encourage a company to do so. “These are some of our most broken laws,” Scott Faber, who leads government affairs at the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit research organization, told me. By the E.W.G.’s count, more than eighty countries, from the United Kingdom to Cambodia to Myanmar, have enacted stronger cosmetics regulations than the United States. And whereas some countries’ regulators have banned more than twenty-four hundred cosmetic ingredients, from parabens to formaldehyde, the F.D.A. has banned or restricted fewer than a dozen.

“People think if there’s a problem the government would address it, but cosmetics is probably the best example of weak regulatory action leaving the American people unprotected,” the epidemiologist David Michaels told me. Michaels, the former head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the author of “The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception,” sees talc as a case study in what he calls “working the refs,” whereby an industry successfully resists oversight by interfering with the most basic terms of regulation, from definitions to measurements to methodologies. By way of illustration, he points to a powerful voice in the cosmetics industry: a trade group once called the Cosmetic, Toiletry, and Fragrance Association, and now known as the Personal Care Products Council.

The C.T.F.A. demonstrated its clout in the seventies, when advocacy groups, among them the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the Environmental Defense Fund, began urging the F.D.A. to regulate asbestos in cosmetics. In 1973, the agency proposed a rule that would require talc to be “at least 99.9 percent free of amphibole types of asbestos fibers and at least 99.99 percent free of chrysotile asbestos fibers.” The C.T.F.A. had just hired a young lobbyist, E. Edward Kavanaugh, the father of the Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who would go on to run the organization for twenty years; according to 990 forms that the C.T.F.A. submitted to the I.R.S., he eventually earned an annual salary package of four and a half million dollars.

The trade group organized a “talc task force” to resist the new standard. Among companies that would be affected were, in addition to Johnson & Johnson, Avon, which made Unforgettable Perfumed Talc, and Colgate-Palmolive, which made Cashmere Bouquet—companies that would also go on to face lawsuits alleging that their talcum powder caused cancer.

The C.T.F.A. homed in on the F.D.A.’s proposed testing method, alleging that it “results in both false-positive and false-negative findings” and that it was burdensomely “tedious.” As the C.T.F.A. advocated for a less sensitive testing method, an employee at one of the member companies told colleagues in a memo that they probably wouldn’t have to worry too much about a new F.D.A. limit on asbestos, as regulators “have neither the money nor the manpower to pursue matters so that they will have airtight cases in scientific matters.”

By 1976, the F.D.A. had all but given up regulating asbestos in talc, in part because Johnson & Johnson, which had the lion’s share of the powder market, had encouraged the C.T.F.A. to preëmpt government regulation with self-regulation. The group approved an industry-wide, voluntary standard that cosmetic talc should contain “no detectable fibrous, asbestos minerals.” Then the members chose their own detection method—one that didn’t test for chrysotile asbestos and could only show levels of amphibole asbestos when they were five times higher than what the F.D.A. had originally proposed. The epidemiologist David Egilman, who has studied asbestos and testified as a witness on behalf of plaintiffs in talc lawsuits, compared this to companies placing needles on a bathroom scale and then denying that those needles existed because they didn’t weigh enough to register. (A lawsuit brought against P.C.P.C. alleging negligence and conspiracy was dismissed by a New Jersey judge last year.)

Cosmetic companies have since used the voluntary standard to claim that talc products made after 1976 are “asbestos-free,” a claim repeated far and wide, including on a part of Johnson & Johnson’s Web site dedicated to “The Facts About Talc Safety.” The trade group and its allies also used the voluntary standard to challenge medical literature showing a correlation between talc and cancer. Any incidence of cancer that predated the standard might have come from asbestos in talc, the industry argument goes. And since talc is now thoroughly tested for asbestos, no further regulation is necessary. The only problem is that as recently as 2019 the F.D.A. found asbestos in several talc products on store shelves, including in one bottle of Johnson & Johnson baby powder. (A company statement blames testing error or contamination. The F.D.A. stands by its findings.)

Another C.T.F.A. success came in late 2000, after the National Toxicology Program, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services, first considered classifying talc as a carcinogen, whether or not it contained asbestiform fibres. As one supplier warned his industry colleagues in a presentation, if the N.T.P. declared talc a carcinogen, “civil litigation would likely skyrocket” and there would be “a virtual immediate loss of our sales.” So the C.T.F.A. worked with some of the same product-defense firms that tobacco companies used in their fight against regulation, including the Weinberg Group and the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness, to create confusion about the definition of talc and to deploy the voluntary asbestos standard against the N.T.P. Although an overwhelming majority of the N.T.P.’s scientists had originally voted for the classification, the vote was changed after the campaign. (Talc was later withdrawn from consideration entirely. The only other instance in which the N.T.P. reviewed and then withdrew something from consideration involved a study of the carcinogenic effects of night shift work and light at night.) “We (the talc industry) dodged a bullet in December based entirely on the confusion over the definition issue,” one of Johnson & Johnson’s talc suppliers confided in a private e-mail. But a colleague of his cautioned that there was work left to do in fighting off further regulation: “Time to come up with more confusion!”

Shortly afterward, the C.T.F.A. brought on a new executive: John Bailey, who was hired after he’d served ten years as the head of the F.D.A. office overseeing the Division of Cosmetics. Bailey has since made more than two hundred dollars per hour testifying as an expert witness for Johnson & Johnson and other companies in talc litigation.

There are two levers to pull when it comes to consumer protection: one before the harm is done, and one after. In June of 2013, nearly four years after Deane Berg filed her lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson, she drove five hours to Rapid City to meet with company lawyers, who, she told me, offered her a settlement of eight hundred thousand dollars. Would the company also add a warning label to its baby powder? Berg asked. No, said the lawyers, who then increased the proposed settlement by another half million dollars. The offer was contingent on her never saying that baby powder had caused her cancer. (The company denies this version of events.)

She left the meeting with the lawyers and went for a walk with her second husband, who had come with her for moral support. “You know I didn’t go into this to make a buck,” she told him. “I wanted to get this out there for the public, so women don’t suffer like I did.” When she went back inside, she announced her decision: “If you’re not going to put a warning on the powder and you’re not going to tell women, I’ll see you in court.”

That fall, Berg’s case went before a jury in Sioux Falls. Three experts appeared on her behalf, including Daniel Cramer, an epidemiologist at the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, who had published one of the first studies showing an increased risk of ovarian cancer from using talcum powder. Johnson & Johnson had five experts who disputed the link between talc and cancer and suggested that the talc found in Berg’s ovary was from contamination of the sample at the hospital where she was treated.

The trial lasted two weeks. Berg’s lawyers warned her that South Dakota juries often sided with defendants in product-liability cases, but, whatever the outcome, her case was already significant. Even though the company had challenged every one of her expert witnesses, they had all been accepted by the court, clearing a crucial judicial hurdle known as the Daubert standard.

During the two days that the jury spent deliberating, a blizzard descended on South Dakota. Berg, sitting at the plaintiff’s table, was struck by how silent the courtroom was when the jurors returned with a verdict: Johnson & Johnson was guilty of negligence. One of the company’s lawyers slammed a notebook shut. Then the clerk turned to the matter of compensatory and punitive damages—how much Berg would receive for her medical expenses and how much Johnson & Johnson would have to pay her for its failure to warn consumers of the risk of cancer associated with its product. The amount, in both categories, was the same: nothing.

For a jury to find a company guilty of negligence yet award no damages is rare, and to a different plaintiff that outcome might have been devastating. But Berg, who had turned down more than a million dollars in order to warn other women, found peace in the knowledge that, whatever else had happened, she had made it easier for future plaintiffs to fare better. Which they did, until they didn’t. Once juries started turning against Johnson & Johnson, Johnson & Johnson, looking for a better way out of mass litigation, turned against juries.

It wasn’t that Johnson & Johnson always lost in court; on the contrary, the company ultimately prevailed in most of the talc cases that went to trial. But, when it lost, it lost big. In 2016, juries in Missouri awarded seventy-two million dollars to the family of a woman who died of ovarian cancer, then fifty-five million and seventy million to two women living with the disease. In 2020, the company settled more than a thousand cases for around a hundred million dollars total, and, in a separate suit, twenty-two women were together awarded more than four billion dollars in damages. On appeal, some of the awards were reduced or overturned. But last year the company, in its Securities and Exchange Commission filing, disclosed that it had set aside $3.9 billion primarily for talc-related litigation.

By then, the bulk of the talc lawsuits had been organized into what is known as multi-district litigation. M.D.L.s can involve thousands of plaintiffs and hundreds of lawyers, mostly pursuing damages from large companies accused of producing defective drugs or faulty products or compromising consumer data. In theory, M.D.L.s are economical, efficient, and more equitable than other mass torts. By combining pretrial work like depositions and discovery, they streamline litigation, unclogging the federal courts and saving both sides time and fees. They can also produce more consistent rulings than stand-alone cases, thereby avoiding lottery-like outcomes in which some plaintiffs receive huge verdicts and others, like Deane Berg, get nothing.

In reality, however, almost everyone involved in M.D.L.s hates them. Defendants complain that plaintiffs are poorly vetted, and an estimated thirty to forty per cent of them are later found to be ineligible or even fraudulent. (Johnson & Johnson estimates that plaintiff firms have collectively spent as much as four and a half million dollars per month on advertising to recruit women with ovarian cancer as clients.) Plaintiffs, meanwhile, dislike the impersonal nature of consolidated representation and the high fees involved, which include lawyers’ billable hours, meals, and travel (sometimes on private flights), and can rise to more than forty per cent of settlements. And plaintiffs and defendants alike complain about the sluggishness of the enterprise. M.D.L.s can take years to reach a conclusion, during which time the opposing sides turn into nation-states of sorts, each with its own G.D.P. and factions, to say nothing of its own press secretaries, pundits, dignitaries, emissaries, and even mercenaries, all chasing after a resolution that is technically if preposterously known as “global peace.”

M.D.L. No. 2738 was formed on October 4, 2016, and assigned to the District of New Jersey, where Johnson & Johnson and many other pharmaceutical companies are headquartered. The litigation, which ultimately included more than thirty-eight thousand women with ovarian cancer, was assigned to Judge Freda Wolfson. She spent half a decade sorting through all the pretrial work and selecting what are called the bellwethers: a small sample of plaintiffs whose suits would go to trial, each verdict helping the parties gauge the likely settlement figure, and thereby moving the M.D.L. closer to a conclusion.

Alexandra Lahav, who teaches complex litigation at Cornell Law School, observes that, of the more than a hundred medical-related product-liability M.D.L.s since 2000, only four exclusively affected men. Twenty-two exclusively affected women, including the Johnson & Johnson case and others involving contraceptives such as Yaz and medical devices such as transvaginal mesh. In addition, the women’s cases over all involved far more plaintiffs per case than those affecting men. Lahav believes that these disparities reflect biases in the regulatory apparatus that tolerate greater risks for women than for men. “With women, especially women’s reproductive health, history demonstrates again and again that these products aren’t tested well, the side effects aren’t well known, and there appear to be more adverse events,” Lahav told me. “There’s this sense that it’s O.K. to experiment on women’s bodies in real time.” When such experiments go wrong, they cost companies, but not as much as they might: according to Lahav, lawyers on both sides report that women’s cases are less profitable than cases involving men.

Last summer, Johnson & Johnson reportedly offered somewhere between four and five billion dollars to settle the cases in M.D.L. No. 2738. That deal fell apart, but, in any case, it would not have ended all the litigation the company was facing. Not everyone suing Johnson & Johnson is part of that M.D.L., and not all of the plaintiffs have ovarian cancer. Some are suffering from mesothelioma, a rare and lethal form of cancer, associated with asbestos exposure, that eats away at the thin layer of tissue surrounding the body’s internal organs and often results in death within a year of diagnosis. One of those plaintiffs is Patricia Cook, a fifty-eight-year-old personal trainer and mother of two sons from Virginia Beach. She never lived or worked anywhere near asbestos, but her mother had been an employee of Johnson & Johnson and encouraged her daughters to use the company’s products. Cook began using baby powder when she was twelve—applying it, like Deane Berg, after every shower, and later, once she had children, after every diaper change. In 2020, when those children were grown, Cook found a lump on the lower right side of her abdomen. She went in for an ultrasound, and the technician found a nodule behind her cervix. Given the choice between a biopsy and a hysterectomy, she chose the latter, but during the procedure the surgeon found that her reproductive system was riddled with tumors and decided to biopsy as many as he could. “I got the results on MyChart,” she told me: malignant peritoneal mesothelioma.

Historically, mesothelioma has been associated with men who worked in mining or construction, although it sometimes affected their wives and daughters as well. Now, though, according to Michael Becich, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine who runs the National Mesothelioma Virtual Tissue Bank, “we’re seeing a much younger population and also more women.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported that in the past twenty years there has been a twenty-five-per-cent increase in the number of women who died of the disease: four hundred and eighty-nine in 1999 to six hundred and fourteen in 2020, with the highest number of deaths occurring among homemakers. As early as 1997, lawyers working on behalf of Johnson & Johnson to fight a Texas woman’s mesothelioma lawsuit against the company noted in an internal memo that “rare cases of mesothelioma among women with no other identifiable exposure might be related to exposure to cosmetic talc.”

“I was just in shock,” Cook said of her diagnosis. “I spent my life eating healthy and exercising.” She had just wed her second husband, and, she told me, “I hadn’t married him to be my caretaker. We had plans for a long life.” COVID restrictions kept him from being with her in the hospital, where she spent long stretches alone, having her uterus, omentum, gallbladder, appendix, spleen, part of her peritoneum, part of her diaphragm, and some of her intestines removed, then undergoing hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy, an intensive treatment in which drugs are poured directly into the abdomen.

Partly to cover medical bills and partly hoping to protect other women, Cook filed a lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson. Her lawyers said that her trial would likely begin in May, 2022. But, as her lawyers were preparing their case, Cook learned that it would not move forward. Nor would any of the other cases in state courts or the tens of thousands of cases that were part of the federal M.D.L. Like planes suddenly grounded at every airport in the country, those cases were all stayed when Johnson & Johnson filed for bankruptcy.

Johnson & Johnson’s lawyers would have it be known that their company—officially, Johnson & Johnson Consumer Inc.—never filed for bankruptcy. The company that did so was called LTL Management L.L.C. LTL, which stands for Legacy Talc Litigation, was created in Texas on October 11, 2021, and merged on the following day with—let’s call it Old J. & J. That same day, LTL Management was converted to a limited-liability company based in North Carolina, and two days after that, on October 14th, it filed for Chapter 11 protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Charlotte.

The L.L.C. that Johnson & Johnson created never had an office or any employees of its own in Texas or North Carolina. It never manufactured or sold talcum powder; for that matter, it never really conducted any business at all before going belly up. Still, in between its formation in one business-friendly jurisdiction and its bankruptcy in another, the new company took on all of Old J. & J.’s talc liabilities. It was suddenly responsible for some forty thousand talc cases, while a new company, also called Johnson & Johnson Consumer Inc., emerged with all of Old J. & J.’s assets—those tens of billions of dollars—and none of its talc liabilities, leaving it free to carry on with its operations.

The bankruptcy route taken by Johnson & Johnson, formally called a divisional merger, is better known as the Texas two-step. Greg Gordon, a partner at Jones Day, the law firm that has represented every company that has attempted the move so far, has observed that although some portray it as “the greatest innovation in the history of bankruptcy,” the two-step is more than thirty years old. It came into being in 1989, when the Texas legislature amended its Business Corporation Act, permitting a single corporation to divide into two or more entities, including when facing extremely expensive litigation.

No corporation was daring enough to try the two-step until 2017, when Koch Industries used it to shield a subsidiary, Georgia-Pacific, from asbestos claims related to its paper and building products. The parent company formed a Texas corporation called, improbably, Bestwall, which declared bankruptcy in North Carolina three months later, spinning off all the asbestos-related liabilities while allowing Georgia-Pacific to continue making billions of dollars in profits through its other products, among them Brawny paper towels, Quilted Northern toilet paper, and Dixie cups.

Johnson & Johnson is the fourth company to attempt the two-step and, thus far, the most brazen, having collapsed the interval between formation and bankruptcy from three months to seventy-two hours. According to a recent Reuters investigation, the two-step plan at Johnson & Johnson was known internally as Project Plato. As one of the lawyers involved wrote in a memo, “It is critical that any activities related to Project Plato, including the mere fact the project exists, be kept in strict confidence.”

Project Plato has succeeded in pausing Patricia Cook’s lawsuit, and the company will be protected from her case and all others in perpetuity if it is granted a non-debtor release, which extends the shield of bankruptcy to non-bankrupt parties. Non-debtor releases were a lightning rod in the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy, when members of the Sackler family sought to be spared future liability by contributing to the company’s opioid settlement fund. These releases were also part of the bankruptcies that followed sexual-abuse cases against USA Gymnastics, the Boy Scouts of America, and Catholic dioceses around the country. In all these cases, the bankruptcy of one entity was used by others—family members, training facilities, insurance companies, individual parishes—to try to minimize financial liability.

In the Texas two-step, such releases are particularly audacious, since they shield not only ancillary parties but also the party with the greatest liability, to say nothing of the greatest assets—in this case, Johnson & Johnson, which is seeking protection from both current suits and future talc litigation. (The company disputes this characterization, and said in a statement, “LTL’s Chapter 11 filing is intended to resolve all claims related to cosmetic talc in a manner that is equitable to all parties.”) Lindsey Simon, a professor at the University of Georgia School of Law, calls such corporate actors “bankruptcy grifters,” since they enjoy the benefits of bankruptcy but don’t suffer any of its burdens, such as transparency requirements, and they do so without, in any meaningful sense, going bankrupt. “They want the good parts of bankruptcy,” she told me, “without any of the bad parts.”

Michael Kaplan, a bankruptcy judge in New Jersey, inherited Johnson & Johnson’s Chapter 11 filing when, in the first sign of how unusual the case was, a bankruptcy judge in the Western District of North Carolina refused to hear it. In February, in response to plaintiffs’ objections, Kaplan ruled that there was “no impropriety” in the use of the Texas two-step. Allowing the bankruptcy to proceed, he appointed Kenneth Feinberg, who administered the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund and the BP Deepwater Horizon Disaster Victim Compensation Fund, to estimate the value of the talc litigation before the end of the year.

That estimate might not matter, though. Critics say that the point of Project Plato was to try to create an entity with limited assets: specifically, two billion dollars so far to settle current and future claims. That figure is less than half of what Johnson & Johnson reportedly offered the ovarian-cancer plaintiffs in the M.D.L. just last summer, to say nothing of what they could owe all the mesothelioma plaintiffs. And, needless to say, it is also far less than the company’s assets. Johnson & Johnson has already spent nearly a billion dollars—half the value of the settlement fund—on its own legal defense. The company’s bankrupt subsidiary, meanwhile, has its own legal costs, including fees paid to Neal Katyal, the former Solicitor General and a current partner at the law firm Hogan Lovells, who charged $2,465 per hour.

“Shameful,” “indefensible,” “complicated trickery that ordinary people don’t have access to”: thus have members of the Senate Judiciary Committee decried Johnson & Johnson’s bankruptcy maneuver. Earlier this year, the committee held a bipartisan hearing on the two-step loophole and whether it could become corporate America’s default way of avoiding consumer liability, letting companies with problem products squeeze through it with billions of dollars in assets intact. Among those who testified at the hearing was a single mother named Kimberly Naranjo.

Naranjo, who had been abused as a young girl, moved in and out of the foster-care system and struggled with addiction until an aunt helped her turn her life around. In 2021, fifteen years sober, she had bought her first house and was starting a new job as an addiction counsellor at the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office when she felt a pain in her side. A week later, she learned that the pain was caused by mesothelioma. Naranjo had no known exposure to asbestos, but at twenty, when she had her first child and was trying to be a better mother than her own had been, she began using Johnson & Johnson’s powder at every diaper change. She did the same for six more children, and all along she used baby powder in her underwear and in her shoes, to combat sweat and body odor in the Utah heat.

Her disease forced her to leave her job, and, unable to pay her mortgage, she soon lost the house. When she learned that she could file a lawsuit, she thought that a settlement might help with her medical expenses or provide for her children after her death. Then came the bankruptcy, which stalled cases like hers and kept other women from even filing.

“I am so grateful that you have listened to me,” Naranjo said to those who attended the congressional hearing. “I wish that Johnson & Johnson would listen, too, but they took away that right from me and thousands of other people who have their own stories, families, and lives that also deserve a right to be heard by a jury.”

Judge Kaplan’s ruling allowing the Johnson & Johnson bankruptcy to proceed has been appealed by the Official Committee of Talc Claimants, which was organized by the U.S. Department of Justice to represent the mesothelioma and ovarian-cancer victims in the Chapter 11 case. Lawyers for those plaintiffs called the bankruptcy a “shell game” designed to “slough off [the company’s] responsibility,” and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit is holding an expedited hearing this month to consider these plaintiffs’ challenge.

Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, a professor at the University of Georgia School of Law who studies mass litigation, told me that corporate America is watching the Third Circuit closely. “We’re clearly seeing a strategy here to get the closure every company wants: ending all the state and federal lawsuits at once, reassuring their shareholders everything’s fine,” she said. Burch noted that many companies are exploring strategic bankruptcy as a cheaper, faster way out of mass torts. 3M recently tried to move tens of thousands of lawsuits filed by veterans over its allegedly defective Combat Arms Earplugs into bankruptcy after three years of litigating the cases in an M.D.L. Bayer could decide that bankruptcy court is a better way out of the long-tail liability it faces from its product Roundup, which contains glyphosate, a chemical that plaintiffs claim has been linked to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Plaintiffs are watching the Third Circuit closely as well. In the summer of 2021, the National Council of Negro Women filed a lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson for false and predatory advertising to communities of color. Because of the two-step, that suit is stayed. And, in July, Johnson & Johnson took the two-step one step further by asking the bankruptcy court for an injunction against the states of Mississippi and New Mexico. Some forty other states are negotiating with Johnson & Johnson’s bankrupt subsidiary to settle their own consumer-protection cases against the company, but those two states were planning to go to trial. If Kaplan stays their cases as well, “principles of federalism [could] vanish,” they allege in their opposition to the injunction, “while a multi-billion-dollar entity contorts the bankruptcy code to shield itself from the states’ constitutional and statutory exercise of their police and regulatory powers.”

If companies can use the two-step to protect themselves from any and all consumer liability, even from states themselves, what’s left to hold them accountable? The Department of Justice has been investigating Johnson & Johnson since 2019, but little is known about the status or the aims of that investigation. The D.O.J. may or may not bring criminal charges. The Third Circuit may or may not toss the bankruptcy case. Congress may or may not curtail the Texas two-step or empower the F.D.A. to regulate cosmetics more effectively. Anything is possible.

But, for now, the only people who have ever held Johnson & Johnson responsible for its actions are those who have served on juries. Deane Berg went to court rather than accept a settlement in the belief that, upon hearing her story, a jury would agree that Johnson & Johnson should have warned consumers about the potential dangers of talc.

Patricia Cook may never get that chance. She knows how deadly mesothelioma is but could not bear to ask her doctors for a prognosis, choosing instead to appreciate every additional day. Kimberly Naranjo, though, is already in hospice care and unlikely to reach what she had taken to calling her “expiration date,” a month before her fiftieth birthday. She knows she won’t live long enough to see justice done. She isn’t even sure what justice would look like.

Yet all of us know what justice doesn’t look like. Johnson & Johnson’s most recent quarterly report shows twenty-four billion dollars in sales, and, in the eleven months since it filed for bankruptcy, an average of one woman a day has died waiting to find out if her case against the company would ever be heard. ♦

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Johnson and Johnson Crisis Management Case Study

Effective crisis management is a crucial aspect of maintaining a company’s reputation and mitigating potential damage during challenging times.

One company that exemplifies successful crisis management is Johnson & Johnson (J&J), a renowned multinational pharmaceutical and consumer goods corporation.

In this case study, we delve into a significant incident that tested J&J’s crisis management capabilities—the Tylenol cyanide poisoning incident in 1982.

Through Johnson and Johnson Crisis Management Case Study , we gain valuable insights into their strategic approach, their commitment to public safety, and their efforts to rebuild trust and brand reputation.

Through this examination, we can extract valuable lessons and best practices for organizations facing their own crisis situations.

Join us as we explore the Johnson & Johnson crisis management case study and uncover the keys to effectively navigating a company through turbulent times.

Background of Tylenol cyanide poisoning incident in 1982

One company that exemplifies successful crisis management is Johnson & Johnson (J&J), a renowned multinational pharmaceutical and consumer goods corporation. In this case study, we delve into a significant incident that tested J&J’s crisis management capabilities—the Tylenol cyanide poisoning incident in 1982.

This tragic event sent shockwaves through the nation and posed a severe threat to J&J’s brand reputation. However, it was the company’s swift and decisive actions that not only saved lives but also set a new standard for crisis management in the business world.

It all began when several individuals in the Chicago area tragically lost their lives after consuming Tylenol capsules that had been tampered with and laced with cyanide.

The severity of the crisis stemmed from multiple factors.

Firstly, the loss of human lives was a tragic and deeply unsettling event, leaving communities in mourning and creating a climate of uncertainty surrounding the safety of consumer products.

Secondly, the incident struck at the core of J&J’s reputation as a trusted healthcare brand. Tylenol, one of their flagship products, was synonymous with reliability and had become a household name. The tampering incident threatened to tarnish J&J’s reputation for quality and safety, potentially leading to a significant decline in consumer trust.

Furthermore, the crisis had the potential to have far-reaching consequences beyond the immediate incident. It raised concerns about the safety of over-the-counter medications as a whole, casting doubt on the reliability of an entire industry.

The impact of the crisis on J&J’s reputation cannot be understated. It was a defining moment that tested the company’s values, credibility, and ability to navigate through a crisis.

How J&J responded to this immense challenge would determine whether they could regain the trust of consumers, rebuild their brand, and serve as a benchmark for crisis management in the corporate world.

Johnson and Johnson Crisis Management Strategy 

Here’s are main features of J&J crisis management stragegy:

Swift response and communication

One of the key pillars of Johnson & Johnson’s crisis management strategy during the Tylenol cyanide poisoning incident was their swift response and effective communication. Recognizing the urgency of the situation, J&J acted promptly to address the crisis and mitigate its potential impact on public safety and their reputation.

Upon learning about the tampering incident, Johnson & Johnson made the immediate decision to recall all Tylenol products from store shelves nationwide. This recall was an unprecedented move, as J&J prioritized public safety over financial considerations. By swiftly removing the potentially contaminated products from the market, J&J demonstrated a commitment to protecting their consumers and reinforcing the trust that had been shaken.

In addition to the recall, J&J proactively communicated with the public, media, and relevant stakeholders. They held press conferences to provide regular updates on the situation, sharing transparent information about the incident, the recall, and the measures being taken to ensure public safety. This open and honest communication strategy helped to establish J&J as a responsible and accountable company, committed to resolving the crisis and protecting the well-being of their customers.

Moreover, J&J collaborated closely with law enforcement agencies and regulatory bodies throughout the investigation. By actively cooperating with authorities, they demonstrated a commitment to holding those responsible for the tampering accountable and restoring public confidence in the safety of their products.

J&J’s decision to recall Tylenol from store shelves nationwide

One of the most significant actions taken by Johnson & Johnson during the Tylenol cyanide poisoning incident was their decision to recall Tylenol products from store shelves nationwide. This recall was a bold and unprecedented move that showcased J&J’s commitment to public safety and their determination to address the crisis head-on.

Recognizing the potential danger posed by the tampered Tylenol capsules, J&J prioritized the well-being of their consumers over any financial implications. Instead of limiting the recall to specific regions or batches of products, they took the proactive and decisive step of recalling all Tylenol products across the United States. This bold decision demonstrated a commitment to protecting the public and preventing further harm.

Transparent communication: public statements and press conferences

Johnson & Johnson (J&J) understood that keeping the public informed and involved was crucial to rebuilding trust and maintaining their reputation as a responsible and accountable company.

J&J promptly issued public statements to address the situation, providing accurate and up-to-date information about the tampering incident and the steps they were taking to ensure public safety. These statements were widely disseminated through various media channels, ensuring that the public had access to the most current information directly from the company.

Furthermore, J&J held press conferences to communicate directly with the media and the public. These press conferences served as platforms for J&J executives and spokespersons to address concerns, answer questions, and provide reassurance. By openly facing the media and engaging in transparent dialogue, J&J demonstrated their commitment to accountability and their willingness to address the crisis head-on.

Cooperation with law enforcement and regulatory agencies

Johnson & Johnson (J&J) prioritized collaboration and cooperation with law enforcement and regulatory agencies during the Tylenol cyanide poisoning incident. Recognizing the need for a comprehensive investigation and the importance of working with authorities, J&J actively engaged with these entities to address the crisis effectively.

J&J immediately reached out to local law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI, and regulatory bodies, including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). They provided full cooperation, sharing any relevant information and evidence to aid in the investigation. By partnering with these agencies, J&J demonstrated a commitment to finding the culprits responsible for the tampering and ensuring justice was served.

The collaboration with law enforcement and regulatory agencies served multiple purposes. Firstly, it helped expedite the investigation process, leveraging the expertise and resources of these entities to identify the source of the tampered Tylenol products. This cooperation was essential not only for resolving the immediate crisis but also for preventing any future incidents of a similar nature.

Secondly, by actively engaging with authorities, J&J showcased their commitment to public safety and adherence to legal and regulatory requirements. This collaboration sent a clear message that J&J was not only focused on mitigating the immediate crisis but also on preventing any potential threats to consumer well-being.

Introduction of tamper-evident packaging to prevent future tampering incidents

Following the Tylenol cyanide poisoning incident, Johnson & Johnson (J&J) took proactive measures to enhance product safety and prevent future tampering incidents. One of the key steps they implemented was the introduction of tamper-evident packaging, a groundbreaking innovation in the pharmaceutical and consumer goods industry.

Tamper-evident packaging is designed to provide visible indicators of tampering or unauthorized access to a product. J&J recognized that by incorporating such packaging, they could provide consumers with an extra layer of assurance and instill confidence in the integrity of their products.

The new packaging featured several innovative elements, such as foil seals, blister packs, and other tamper-resistant mechanisms. These measures made it visibly evident if a product had been tampered with, allowing consumers to easily identify any potential risks and avoid using compromised products.

By introducing tamper-evident packaging, J&J demonstrated their commitment to learning from the crisis and proactively addressing the vulnerabilities that had been exposed. The implementation of this new packaging was not only a response to the immediate incident but also a long-term solution to safeguard consumer safety and prevent future tampering incidents.

Collaboration with industry and government bodies to establish safety standards

J&J actively engaged with industry associations, regulatory agencies, and other relevant stakeholders to develop and promote stringent safety standards. They collaborated with organizations such as the Consumer Healthcare Products Association (CHPA) to share best practices, exchange information, and develop industry-wide guidelines for product safety and tamper prevention.

Furthermore, J&J worked closely with government bodies, including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), to establish robust regulations and protocols for product packaging, labeling, and security. They actively participated in discussions and provided valuable insights based on their experience during the crisis, contributing to the development of comprehensive safety standards.

Through these collaborative efforts, J&J played an instrumental role in shaping industry norms and regulatory frameworks. They shared their expertise, lessons learned, and innovative solutions to raise the bar for product safety across the pharmaceutical and consumer goods sectors.

Compensating victims and affected parties

J&J established a compensation fund to assist victims and their families. This fund aimed to cover medical expenses, counseling services, and other related costs incurred as a result of the tampering incident. By offering financial support, J&J demonstrated their willingness to take responsibility for the harm caused and to help alleviate the burdens faced by those affected.

Moreover, J&J engaged in direct communication and outreach to affected parties, expressing empathy and understanding for the challenges they endured. This personalized approach helped to build trust and foster a sense of care and support, showing that J&J was committed to assisting and standing by those affected by the crisis.

Offering refunds and product exchanges to restore consumer confidence

As part of their efforts to rebuild trust and restore consumer confidence after the Tylenol cyanide poisoning incident, Johnson & Johnson (J&J) implemented a customer-focused approach by offering refunds and product exchanges.

Understanding that consumers may have concerns about the safety of their purchased Tylenol products, J&J took proactive measures to address these concerns. They established a refund and exchange program, allowing customers to return any Tylenol products they had purchased, no questions asked. This initiative provided consumers with the opportunity to receive a refund or exchange their products for alternative J&J offerings.

Reintroduction of Tylenol to the market with improved packaging and safety measures

J&J invested substantial resources in developing and implementing enhanced packaging and safety measures for Tylenol products. They introduced tamper-evident packaging, which included innovative features such as foil seals, blister packs, or other mechanisms designed to clearly indicate whether the product had been tampered with. These visible deterrents provided consumers with a sense of confidence and security, knowing that they could easily identify if the product’s integrity had been compromised.

By reintroducing Tylenol with improved packaging and safety measures, J&J demonstrated their dedication to learning from the crisis and implementing tangible solutions. This proactive approach showed that J&J had taken concrete steps to address the vulnerabilities that had been exposed and to prevent similar incidents from happening again.

Recommendations for other organizations facing potential cirisies

Organizations facing potential crises can learn from J&J’s experience and consider the following recommendations:

• Proactive risk assessment: Conduct regular risk assessments to identify potential vulnerabilities and develop strategies to address them. This includes evaluating supply chain security, product packaging integrity, and other areas relevant to consumer safety.
• Crisis management plan: Develop a comprehensive crisis management plan that outlines roles, responsibilities, communication protocols, and steps for rapid response. Regularly review and update the plan to align with changing circumstances and emerging risks.
• Strong internal communication: Establish effective internal communication channels to ensure that all employees are aware of the crisis management plan and their roles during a crisis. This promotes a coordinated response and consistent messaging.
• Regular media monitoring: Implement a media monitoring system to stay informed about public sentiment, detect early signs of potential crises, and respond swiftly to emerging issues. This helps manage reputation and allows for timely interventions.
• Continuous improvement: Embrace a culture of continuous improvement by regularly evaluating and enhancing product safety measures, quality control processes, and crisis management strategies. Learning from past incidents helps strengthen resilience and prevent future crises.

Final Words 

Johnson and Johnson Crisis Management Case Study serves as a remarkable case study in crisis management. The swift response, transparent communication, recall decision, cooperation with law enforcement, and prioritization of public safety played pivotal roles in mitigating the impact of the crisis and rebuilding trust.

J&J’s commitment to consumer well-being over financial considerations, introduction of tamper-evident packaging, collaboration with industry and government bodies to establish safety standards, and their focus on preparedness and having a crisis management plan in place are valuable lessons for organizations facing potential crises.

Johnson and Johnson Crisis Management Case Study serves as a reminder that crises can happen unexpectedly, but with a well-prepared and thoughtful approach, organizations can successfully navigate these challenges, rebuild trust, and emerge stronger than before.

About The Author

Tahir Abbas

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News | Tragedy, then triumph: How Johnson & Johnson made sure Tylenol survived the Tylenol murders

Diane Elsroth of Peekskill, New York, shown in a 1980 high school yearbook photo, died at age 23 in February 1986 after taking a cyanide-laced Extra-Strength Tylenol capsule.

Kevin Boyd / Chicago Tribune

Less than two months after the murders, Johnson & Johnson introduced triple-sealed, tamper-resistant packaging.

Carl Hugare / Chicago Tribune

Three caskets are carried into St. Hyacinth Catholic Church in the Avondale neighborhood for the funeral of Adam, Stanley and Terri Janus, all victims of poisoned Tylenol.

Michael Budrys / Chicago Tribune

Chicago Archbishop Joseph Bernardin, center, blesses the Janus family caskets as they are carried out of St. Hyacinth Catholic Church.

Alojza Janus, center, is supported by son-in-law Marian Czyz and husband Tadeusz at the mass for her sons Adam and Stanley Janus, as well as for Stanley's wife, Terri. Another son, Joseph Janus, is seen at right.

A casket is carried out of St. Hyacinth Catholic Church after the funeral Mass for Adam, Stanley and Terri Janus.

Chicago Tribune archive

Seven people died in 1982 from cyanide poisoning after ingesting tainted Tylenol. From clockwise top left are Adam Janus, Mary McFarland, Mary "Lynn" Reiner, Terri and Stanley Janus, Paula Prince and Mary Kellerman.

A crowd watches as one of three caskets containing members of the Janus family is carried out of St. Hyacinth Catholic Church.

Helena and Jan Tarasewicz, center left, the parents of Theresa "Terri" Janus, grieve at the funeral Mass for Terri, her husband Stanley and her brother-in-law Adam Janus at St. Hyacinth Catholic Church.

Don Casper / Chicago Tribune

Chicago resident Paula Prince bought a tainted bottle of Tylenol at the Walgreens at Wells Street and North Avenue.

Phil Greer / Chicago Tribune

Ty Fahner, who was Illinois' attorney general and headed the multiagency task force investigating the Tylenol poisonings, recently described Johnson & Johnson as "a wonderful, willing partner" with law enforcement.

James Mayo / Chicago Tribune

Johnson & Johnson held a nationwide news conference via satellite on Nov. 11, 1982, to announce Tylenol's new tamper-resistant packaging. Journalists watched in Chicago at the Palmer House hotel.

Teresa Janus, the widow of Tylenol victim Adam Janus, is helped out of St. Hyacinth Catholic Church with her daughter Kathy in hand after his funeral Mass.

Charles Osgood / Chicago Tribune

These Tylenol capsules were connected with one of the 1982 poisonings. Cook County doctors found that the capsule at right contained cyanide, which has a grainier texture than the medicine shown at left.

Dr. Edmund Donoghue, right, then the deputy chief medical examiner in Cook County, discusses the Tylenol poisonings on Sept. 30, 1982. At left are Michael Schaffer, the toxicologist who tested the capsules, and Dr. Barry Lifschultz.

Nancy Chen of the Cook County medical examiner's office holds up test tubes containing the analyzed contents of Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules. The darker specimen at right was found to contain cyanide.

Charlie Knoblock / AP

Chicago Archbishop Joseph Bernardin, center, blesses one of the three caskets containing members of the Janus family at a funeral Mass held Oct. 5, 1982, in Chicago.

A photograph of a television screen shows the specific lot number for a batch of Extra-Strength Tylenol that was the first to be recalled.

A still from a drugstore camera shows Paula Prince, center in suit, as she buys a bottle of tainted Tylenol in 1982 at the Walgreens near her home in Chicago.

Alojza Janus, center, who saw two sons fall victim to poisoned Tylenol, is helped by her son-in-law Marian Czyz, left, and her husband, Tadeusz, outside St. Hyacinth in Chicago.

Alojza Janus, center, grieves with her husband, Tadeusz, at right, at St. Hyacinth Catholic Church. They are the parents of Tylenol victims Adam and Stanley Janus.

Quentin C. Dodt / Chicago Tribune

Chicago Mayor Jane Byrne, at right, holds a midnight news conference about a Chicago woman dying from tainted Tylenol. Chicago police Superintendent Richard Brzeczek is at left. Byrne is wearing a formal dress she'd donned for an evening event.

Stacey Wescott / Chicago Tribune

Terri and Stanley Janus on their wedding day. "I thought they would have a long, good life together," said Terri's friend Sandy Botwinski, who was a bridesmaid.

Charlie Knoblock/AP

Chicago City Health Department employees test Tylenol capsules for cyanide at a city laboratory.

John Dziekan / Chicago Tribune

A pharmacist checks lot codes on boxes of Extra-Strength Tylenol. The initial recalls were limited to certain batches of the product.

Three hearses line up outside St. Hyacinth Catholic Church, where the Mass for Adam, Stanley and Terri Janus was held.

Chicago police Officer Sam Barsevich takes inventory of Tylenol bottles that residents turned in at his station.

Ernie Cox Jr. / Chicago Tribune

Johnson & Johnson CEO James Burke talks about Tylenol on "The Phil Donahue Show" in Chicago on Nov. 15, 1982. The company recalled all Tylenol capsules in the wake of seven deaths but soon sought to rebuild its bestselling brand.

Charles Knoblock / AP

Helena Tarasewicz, mother of Tylenol victim Terri Janus, weeps over her daughter's casket during graveside services at Maryhill Cemetery in Chicago.

Terri Janus' parents, Jan and Helena Tarasewicz, from left, grieve at the mass for their daughter at St. Hyacinth Catholic Church.

Johnson & Johnson CEO James Burke holds the tamper-resistant packaging developed for Tylenol in late 1982 in an attempt to save the brand.

Pharmacist Dennis Jordan, right, checks lot codes on bottles of Extra-Strength Tylenol at the Westmont Pharmacy as he removes them from the shelves on Sept. 30, 1982.

The law firm Corboy & Demetrio sued Johnson & Johnson in 1983 over the Tylenol poisonings. A box of documents was photographed this year at the firm's offices.

Fred Jewell/AP

Jose Rosa, right, was one of hundreds of Chicago city employees and volunteers to distribute warnings about cyanide-laced Tylenol in fall 1982. Here, he offers a Spanish-language flyer to Luisa Acevada.

Shortly after sunrise on Sept. 30, 1982, Dr. Edmund Donoghue walked into the Cook County medical examiner’s office and received confirmation of what he had strongly suspected a few hours earlier:

Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules had been laced with cyanide. And they were killing people in the Chicago area.

The news was already starting to get out, thanks to a dogged City News reporter, but there had been no public announcement. Someone needed to warn the public, Donoghue’s colleagues told him. Someone needed to hold a press briefing.

They looked at Donoghue, the 37-year-old deputy chief medical examiner who was in charge that day only because their boss was out of town. He didn’t disagree. He knew they couldn’t sit on this information, not with lives still at risk.

Before holding the briefing, he reached out to executives at McNeil Consumer Products, the Johnson & Johnson subsidiary that manufactures Tylenol. The company had learned about the poisonings only a short time earlier when a reporter called J&J for comment. Company leaders were still trying to wrap their heads around the situation.

They said they understood Donoghue had an important job to do. They just wanted to know: Did he have to say it was Tylenol, specifically? Wasn’t it a little premature?

Donoghue asked them to come up with a better alternative. The executives said they couldn’t.

“What I liked about it was when they said, ‘We can’t,’ ” Donoghue said. “That was practically giving me permission to do it.”

At 9 a.m., Donoghue and two colleagues stepped in front of television cameras and announced the Tylenol deaths.

The announcement sent Tylenol — the country’s top-selling pain reliever — into a tailspin from which many predicted it could not recover.

The fact that it did has become the subject of numerous books and college lectures, held up as a shining example of corporate ethics and crisis management. The safety seals the company introduced after the killings are found on all manner of over-the-counter medications and food products today, making tamper-evident packaging one of the horrific crime’s most enduring legacies.

A Johnson & Johnson spokesperson declined to answer Tribune questions about events related to the poisonings. Instead, she issued a statement lauding the company’s response.

“Our highest responsibility has always been the health and safety of our consumers,” the statement read. “While this tragic incident remains unsolved, this event resulted in important industry improvements to patient safety measures including the creation of tamper-resistant packaging.”

But as is so often the case, there’s more to the story.

‘You take care of this’

As Donoghue made his announcement, Johnson & Johnson executives huddled in CEO James Burke’s fifth-floor office in New Brunswick, New Jersey. J&J had acquired McNeil Laboratories in 1959 and soon began selling Tylenol over the counter through the newly formed McNeil Consumer Products. Its aspirin-free acetaminophen product now dominated the market for nonprescription pain relievers.

David Collins, the recently appointed chairman of McNeil Consumer Products, was among those in the meeting. As he remembers it, the executives had no idea what to do.

Crisis management hadn’t entered the corporate vernacular yet, but this was a crisis and they needed to manage it.

Burke turned and pointed to Collins.

“You take care of this,” Burke said, according to Collins. “This is your responsibility.”

An Oak Park native, Collins immediately took the corporate helicopter to the McNeil headquarters in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, where a significant number of the company’s Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules were produced. The executives established a war room at the plant, giving themselves a dedicated space to discuss potential strategies and options for internal investigations.

Collins told the Tribune he immediately recognized that the crisis couldn’t be managed from corporate boardrooms on the East Coast. He needed to be closer to the epicenter, which at that time was the Cook County morgue near the intersection of Polk and Wood.

“It was pretty clear to me that I had to go to Chicago, that this thing was so important we couldn’t rely on secondhand reports,” Collins said. “But obviously we needed to begin right away and establish some kind of communication with the key people on the West Side of Chicago.”

Collins called his college roommate Paul Noland, a Chicago-area attorney with connections to law enforcement and an understanding of how the city worked. Noland had just opened a law office in Wheaton with Francis “Mike” Heroux, whose friendship with Noland and Collins stretched back to their days at Fenwick, a Catholic high school in Oak Park.

He asked Noland and Heroux to find out whatever they could — and quickly.

Heroux hustled over to the morgue, arriving about 30 minutes after the news conference.

Donoghue took him into the lab, where the toxicologist who worked through the night analyzing capsules from two tainted bottles explained what he found. He had run tests on three capsules from each bottle, and two of those capsules — one from each bottle — had tested positive for cyanide. Heroux stayed about a half-hour and left.

“You know, my dear old mother always said, ‘Trust everybody, but cut the cards.’ All they wanted to do is see the cards we were holding,” Donoghue said. “And once they realized, they left very quickly. There was no point for them to be there.”

Heroux, who died in 2008, didn’t stop looking for answers, though. Two more cyanide-related deaths would soon be confirmed in DuPage County, and Heroux represented the hospital where one of those two victims died. With the health care privacy act known as HIPAA still 14 years away, he was able to use his contacts there to gather information.

“We had more facts than anybody,” Noland recently told the Tribune.

Indeed, Elmhurst Detective Jim O’Brien told the FBI on Oct. 2, 1982, that most of his knowledge about the death of Mary Sue McFarland — a divorced mother of two small boys — came from the coroner and an unnamed Johnson & Johnson attorney.

Law enforcement records show that a J&J attorney came to the Elmhurst Police Department on the morning of Oct. 1 and wanted to share the results of his own investigation. According to the police report, the attorney said he had determined that McFarland had an Anacin bottle in her purse with the tainted Tylenol inside.

In reality, it was a Dristan bottle that held the poisoned capsules, but otherwise the lawyer’s information was spot-on. And it bothered the detective.

“O’Brien expresses his own concern about the attorney conducting (an) investigation in this matter inasmuch as it appeared to him that the attorney may be destroying fingerprints or other valuable evidence during the course of his investigation,” the report stated.

It’s a rare piece of criticism of Johnson & Johnson among the thousands of police records obtained by the Tribune. Others involved in the original Tylenol investigation praised the company for its response. O’Brien died in 2002.

In the very beginning, Collins said, the authorities didn’t know how to deal with Johnson & Johnson, whose employees and plants still needed to be investigated. He says the corporation leaned on Noland and Heroux’s connections to local law enforcement to help form a relationship with the task force.

Collins said the company voluntarily provided lists of disgruntled current and former employees, as well as unhappy customers. It was a start of an unusual partnership between the police and a company amid an investigation that had not yet determined whether the murders had happened while the bottles were under J&J’s control.

“We were polite, but one of the points we made was, guys, look, you know squat about this business,” Collins said. “You have no idea where to look. You have no idea the questions to ask. We’re the only ones who do. And if you don’t allow us to work with you on this, you’re cutting off your nose to spite your face. And that really made sense to them.”

Ty Fahner, then the Illinois attorney general and head of the multiagency task force investigating the poisonings, described J&J as “a wonderful, willing partner” with law enforcement. At the request of state authorities, the company offered a $100,000 reward on Oct. 1 for information leading to the conviction of whoever was responsible for the poisonings.

“They couldn’t have been better,” Fahner said of company executives.

‘Pull all your product’

By the afternoon of Oct. 1, there were six confirmed cyanide deaths: McFarland, Mary “Lynn” Reiner, 12-year-old Mary Kellerman and Adam, Stanley and Theresa Janus.

Johnson & Johnson quickly recalled more than 93,000 bottles from the batch of Tylenol connected to the Janus and Kellerman deaths. The company later expanded it to another 171,000 bottles with the same lot number as the one McFarland purchased.

The company also shut down the production of all Tylenol capsules while executives debated its packaging and marketing strategy internally. Though the FDA was pushing for a nationwide recall on Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules, the federal agency also wanted to assure the public that it could trust over-the-counter pain medication.

A spokesperson for the FDA, Bill Grigg, went on “Nightline” on Oct. 1 and shot down the possibility that the tampering took place at the McNeil Consumer Products plants. In a recent interview with the Tribune, Grigg said he knew that more investigative work had to be done, but he also understood that Americans were panicking.

“I think we got about 5,000 calls just in the next couple of days,” he said. “And many people didn’t have anything in their medicine cabinets but Tylenol. And even if they did have something else, they were suspicious. We did try to promote the idea that tablets could be safe, but people were already frightened.”

Fahner and other Illinois public health officials went much further than either the federal government or the manufacturer, telling people to throw away their Tylenol or turn it in to their local police department.

“People were terrified,” Fahner said. “And as soon as we got the word out that Tylenol had been laced (with cyanide), people said, ‘What do we do?’ I said, ‘Well, if you’ve got any in your medicine cabinet, or if you have any anywhere, either put it in a plastic bag and keep it or throw it away. Do not use it.’ “

Fahner said Johnson & Johnson’s chairman, James E. Burke, called him during the early days of the investigation and asked how he could help. Fahner recalled having just one request:

“Pull all your product from the shelf,” he told Burke.

It took a few days, but Burke eventually agreed to recall all Tylenol capsules.

The final Tylenol death was confirmed on the evening of Oct. 1, when 35-year-old flight attendant Paula Prince was found dead in her Old Town condominium. Chicago police Detectives Jimmy Gildea and Charlie Ford discovered a bottle of Tylenol on her bathroom vanity and a Sept. 29 receipt from a nearby Walgreens on the kitchen counter.

Prince’s poisoning would bring the death toll to seven.

On the way to the medical examiner’s office, the detectives got a radio call. Dispatch wanted them to know that police Superintendent Richard Brzeczek and Mayor Jane Byrne would be meeting them at the morgue — a kind of attention they had never experienced in their careers.

Byrne and Brzeczek had been at a retirement party for a top-ranking police officer at Navy Pier. They arrived at the morgue wearing formal attire and grim expressions. Cook County Medical Examiner Robert Stein, who was also wearing a tuxedo from an earlier engagement, showed them some Tylenol capsules that appeared hastily put together.

Autopsy results would confirm the next day that Prince had been fatally poisoned with cyanide. By then, the public already knew that — because Byrne held a rare midnight news conference to announce the death.

Wearing a frilly evening gown, Byrne sat in front of the microphones and began talking. Brzeczek, dressed in a jacket and tie, stood next to her.

“It was getting to be somewhat of a media circus (that week) because everyone was running around doing press conferences. And she said, ‘We’re going to have a press conference too,’ ” Brzeczek said. “As it turned out, all the TV stations interrupted their network broadcasting and the press conference went live all over the country.”

Byrne made nationwide news again the next morning when she took the most aggressive step since the killings began:

She banned the sale and distribution of Tylenol in Chicago.

Noland, the attorney, was at a party in Glen Ellyn on the night of Oct. 1 when he received word that Byrne was looking to speak with him. When they connected, Byrne said she wanted to see him the next morning in her office.

Noland showed up at City Hall, where Byrne told him of her plan to ban Tylenol. Noland called his longtime friend Collins, who was in an emergency board meeting with other Johnson & Johnson executives.

They quickly formed a position: The company could support pulling Extra-Strength capsules from the store shelves, but they opposed a full ban. Under Byrne’s proposed order hospitals couldn’t use Tylenol 3, the country’s most prescribed analgesic.

Collins said he wanted to explain to the mayor that withdrawing all Tylenol-branded products would present health problems for a lot of people and cause difficulties for medical centers.

The men didn’t think it would help, but they knew the mayor casually. Byrne’s late husband, Bill, had been best friends with Collins’ older brother.

Bill Byrne, the Collins brothers and Noland all went to the University of Notre Dame together. In Chicago politics, there were few more powerful fraternities in 1982 than the Fighting Irish alumni. When they spoke, Collins said, Mayor Byrne greeted him warmly, even inquiring about the health of Collins’ mother.

Then she turned him down flat.

“She was pleasant but unyielding,” said Noland, who went on to become a DuPage County judge. “Let me put it that way.”

Saving the brand

From the start, law enforcement and FDA investigators publicly doubted the capsules had been contaminated at the production plant.

They doubled down on that position after Reiner and McFarland’s deaths because their bottles both came from a McNeil facility in Round Rock, Texas. The Kellerman and Janus bottles were manufactured in Pennsylvania.

Not until Oct. 5, 1982, nearly a week after the victims swallowed their fatal doses, did a task force representative visit one of the plants.

Michael Schaffer, chief toxicologist of the Cook County medical examiner’s office, toured the McNeil facility in Pennsylvania to see if the potassium cyanide kept on the premises could have crept somehow into the production line. The company used the chemical to test the lead content of an ingredient used to make the medication.

After spending a morning there, he ruled out the possibility that bottles were contaminated during manufacturing, telling reporters that “no human hands touch the Tylenol or its ingredients in the automated mixing and packaging process.”

However, he also found that the potassium cyanide was kept in three unlocked quality control laboratories. More than 1,000 people had unfettered access to those labs, according to the company.

FDA testing found the cyanide kept on the McNeil property didn’t have the same trace element pattern — a sort of chemical fingerprint — as the poison placed in the capsules. Either way, a McNeil spokesperson said the firm would keep the cyanide locked up going forward.

The early exoneration from both the FDA and the Tylenol task force proved invaluable to Johnson & Johnson, whose executives knew they couldn’t rebuild their bestselling brand if the public thought the poisonings occurred while the capsules were under their control.

“It couldn’t just be us. It had to be the FDA,” Collins told the Tribune. “The FDA had to come along and say, ‘No, this is not a product problem.’ “

On the same day as Schaffer’s visit, Johnson & Johnson recalled all Tylenol capsules. In addition to pulling the medicine off shelves, it sent 450,000 notices to health professionals, hospitals and customers saying they were taking it “all back, lock, stock and barrel,” records show.

The company also offered to replace the worrisome capsules with the safer tablet form for free. It marked the first mass recall in U.S. history, involving more than 31 million bottles and costing the company $100 million.

“We were trying our darndest to get them removed from the American market,” George Frazza, Johnson & Johnson’s general counsel, testified in 1983. “And, as it turned out, we did a pretty good job.”

The recall announcement, however, was unpopular on Wall Street, where J&J’s stock continued to drop and marketing experts predicted the quick demise of Tylenol. The medication’s share of the market dropped from 37% in September 1982 to about 7% in the following months.

Bottles of Tylenol that weren’t tossed out were sent to Johnson & Johnson, the FDA and various other government laboratories for testing. J&J performed its testing at a corporate distribution center in suburban Lemont, where more than 10 million capsules were checked for cyanide, according to federal records.

On Oct. 21, a Johnson & Johnson employee detected cyanide in a bottle that had been returned to a Dominick’s on Chicago’s North Side. Eleven of the 50 capsules inside were poisoned, according to a police report.

Days later, on Oct. 25, cyanide was detected in another 50-count bottle that had made its way back to McNeil Consumer Products as part of the recall, investigative records show. The wife of a DuPage County judge had bought the Extra-Strength Tylenol on Sept. 29 at Frank’s Finer Foods in Wheaton and later turned it in to her local police department.

James Zagel, who was head of the Illinois state police at the time of the murders, testified in 1983 that he had worked closely with Johnson & Johnson in the investigation’s earliest days. He said he approved of the decision to let the company test the capsules even as authorities were looking to see if a disgruntled J&J employee was behind the poisonings.

“They set this program up in consultation with members of the task force, so we would keep as good a record as we could of where the capsules came from,” he told a jury during the 1983 trial of James Lewis , who tried to extort money from J&J after the poisonings.

Testing eventually identified eight poisoned bottles — five connected to fatal poisonings and three that surfaced after the murders.

At this point, McNeil employees worried that Tylenol wouldn’t survive as a brand. Production was halted indefinitely, investigators had swarmed the campus and tainted capsules were still being found.

Prominent advertising executive Jerry Della Femina predicted consumers would not see the Tylenol name, in any form, on store shelves within a year. A name so closely associated with death, he said, was unsellable.

“There may be an advertising person who thinks he can solve this, and if they find him I want to hire him, because then I want him to turn our water cooler into a wine cooler,” Della Femina told The New York Times on Oct. 8, 1982.

McNeil executives printed and posted the quote all over their offices. Collins said they used it for inspiration as they developed strategies to restore public confidence. The company did consider renaming Tylenol, Collins said, but a name change was rejected largely because of the “stubborn Irish pride” of many of the company’s decision makers who didn’t want to admit defeat.

Instead, the company’s key initiative involved developing tamper-evident packaging to help consumers feel safe enough to take Tylenol again. The Cook County Board of Commissioners already had passed an ordinance requiring safety seals on all medicines, food products and some cosmetics, and the FDA had begun working on federal legislation, though it wouldn’t be passed until 1989.

Collins told the Tribune that the company had been considering these safety measures for years but the poisonings served as the impetus for finally adopting them.

In consultation with the FDA, Collins said, a McNeil task force worked in the company’s research lab to develop packaging that could not be sabotaged.

Less than two months after the murders, Johnson & Johnson introduced triple-sealed packaging that included a box with glued flaps, tight plastic wrap around the bottle cap and a foil seal covering the mouth of the bottle. Labeling on the box and bottle warned consumers not to use the medicine if “safety seals” were broken.

“It was a serious effort because we figured we know more about this package than anybody and if we can’t get into it, the chances are that somebody else can’t get into it either,” Collins said. “We came up with what we thought was effective, tamper-evident packaging and reintroduced the product to the market as capsules.”

In announcing the new packaging in November 1982, CEO Burke said Johnson & Johnson considered it a “moral imperative as well as good business” to restore Tylenol to the same prominence it held in the market prior to the poisonings.

“All of us can demonstrate a united determination not to allow our lives to be ruled by acts of terrorism, not to allow America to be poisoned the way these seven people were poisoned,” Burke told reporters.

To boost consumer interest, J&J launched a marketing blitz promoting the safer bottles and calling attention to the financial hit the company took from the country’s first mass recall. Burke and other executives gave interviews in which they spoke about corporate responsibility and the Johnson & Johnson credo, a mission statement that puts the people the company serves over profit.

McNeil also offered a free bottle of safety-sealed Tylenol to anyone who called the company and requested one. It installed scores of new phone lines, then recruited staff and their families to answer the phones. In a three-hour interview with the Tribune, Collins became emotional as he recalled the many husbands, wives, uncles, aunts, cousins and children of employees who came in to help.

“And we had a lot of people call us and say, ‘We don’t want a bottle. We just want to thank you.’ So that turned out to be quite a success,” Collins said. “And I think it was a major step forward in reestablishing the confidence of the public.”

Within a year of the murders, Tylenol regained its spot as the country’s top pain reliever. Its market share was 30% by the fall of 1983, a more than 300% increase over its post-poisonings nadir.

Tylenol’s advertising firm sent a barrel of wine to Della Femina, who admitted he was wrong.

“One of the greatest tragedies of my career happened to be one of the greatest triumphs,” Collins said. “To this day, I believe that.”

But 1982 wasn’t the end of fatal Tylenol tamperings.

And a few years later, J&J would be forced to make an even bigger decision than simply redesigning its boxes and bottles.

Another Tylenol death

Less than four years after tamper-evident packaging helped Tylenol regain control of the pain reliever market, another capsule poisoning occurred.

Diane Elsroth, a 23-year-old stenographer, took an Extra-Strength Tylenol capsule while visiting the Yonkers, New York, home of her boyfriend’s parents in February 1986. She was found dead in bed the next day. Investigators later determined the capsule — which came from a newly opened, safety-sealed bottle — had been tainted with cyanide.

Another poisoned bottle was found in a nearby town, and stores began removing the product from shelves.

Johnson & Johnson had another public relations crisis on its hands.

Law enforcement inspected the McNeil plant in Pennsylvania and, unlike Illinois investigators in 1982, did not entirely rule out the possibility that the tainting occurred during the medicine’s production or distribution. However, they agreed it was unlikely.

“Until someone is charged with the crime, we can’t say definitively how it happened,” retired Yonkers police Detective Lt. Jack Roach, who oversaw the investigation, told the Tribune this year. “But it would have been hard, virtually impossible, to put (poisoned capsules) into the lots they were shipped in.”

Congress had passed a law in 1983 making product tampering a federal crime, so the FBI had jurisdiction over the case. The New York agents worked closely with their Illinois counterparts to determine whether the latest incidents could have been carried out by the same person responsible for the 1982 killings.

They reached no definitive conclusion.

The FBI and Yonkers police later concluded the poisoned capsules had been placed in bottles after they reached the store shelves. The feds, at one point, stated that their analysis indicated the killer had removed the bottom of the bottle and inserted the capsules that way.

Roach told the Tribune that his squad found it easy to remove safety seals and put them back on using a soldering iron. He said his detectives became so deft at tearing and repairing the seals, nobody could tell the difference.

Johnson & Johnson did not change its tamper-evident packaging after Elsroth’s death, but it did stop selling pull-apart capsules.

“In hindsight, which is 20-20, I wish we had never gone back to marketing these capsules,” Burke told a New York television station.

The statement offered little solace to Elsroth’s mother.

“It’s just three years too late,” Felicia Elsroth told UPI in response.

The lawsuits

While Wall Street and Madison Avenue celebrated Tylenol’s comeback, the families of the seven Chicago-area victims from the 1982 poisonings pushed to hold Johnson & Johnson accountable for their loved ones’ deaths.

In a lawsuit filed in Cook County, the families argued that Johnson & Johnson and McNeil were culpable for the deaths because they knew the capsules were susceptible to tampering. McNeil sold Tylenol to hospitals in tamper-evident packaging in 1982 but did not offer any such safeguards with its over-the-counter products.

The Kellerman and McFarland families were both represented by Corboy & Demetrio, a prominent firm with a national reputation for successfully taking on big corporations. As part of discovery in the case, J&J turned over records showing that it had received nearly 300 consumer complaints involving tampering, mix-ups or contamination before the killings, reports said.

“It should have alerted McNeil and Johnson & Johnson that any form of tampering was possible,” attorney Michael Demetrio told the Tribune this year. “The ability to have safety seals was already there, but guess what? It costs more to do these things, and that’s a big factor in how these corporations operate.”

Collins told the Tribune that executives could not have imagined such a horrific act before it happened.

“We had to ask ourselves, ‘Why didn’t we foresee this? Was this foreseeable?’ And we never really came up with an answer that persuaded us that we should have foreseen a conclusion,” Collins said. “I mean, this was so outrageous what was done. And look at the technique that was used. We just could not figure out how we could have foreseen this.”

On the eve of trial in 1991, Johnson & Johnson settled with the families of all seven victims. As part of the deal, the amount would remain secret and the corporation admitted no wrongdoing.

Noland told the Tribune that he was disappointed in Johnson & Johnson’s decision to settle.

Demetrio declined to discuss the amount, citing the settlement’s confidentiality clause. At the time the deal was announced, attorneys told reporters that the victims’ children would have their college tuition paid.

The 2012 book “The Tylenol Mafia: Marketing, Murder and Johnson & Johnson” states the families received between $200,000 and $990,000 each. Michelle Rosen, one of Reiner’s daughters, collaborated with author Scott Bartz on the book, which criticized authorities for quickly ruling out the possibility that the tampering occurred in the distribution and repackaging channels.

When investigators looked at the distribution and storage routes, they found no indication that the different batches had passed through the same spots at the same time. That, they concluded, made it highly improbable that the bottles would all end up on the shelves of different Chicago-area stores during the same 30-hour window.

Rosen has long pushed back against the investigators’ theory that a “madman” was responsible for placing the bottles on shelves.

“After 40 years, investigators still have been unable to produce a definitive conclusion as to how this crime happened and who did it,” she said in a statement to the Tribune. “By continuing the dead-end track that the investigation has been on, this case will remain unsolved.”

Rosen also has long questioned why Johnson & Johnson was allowed to test the returned capsules, giving the company a quasi-investigative role alongside law enforcement. Records and interviews state the company burned the capsules following testing.

Collins told the Tribune the company destroyed the capsules with law enforcement’s permission at a facility in North Carolina. The entire process, from testing to burning, was monitored by members of the task force, he said.

“They were destroyed because, even in those days, the risk of theft and black market was very real,” Collins said. “So the last thing in the world we wanted to have happened was a story to come out that, you know, 10,000 bottles were stolen.”

Demetrio, a former Cook County prosecutor, challenged the wisdom of letting the corporation play an active role in a police investigation involving its products. However, he said his firm spent nine years looking into the poisonings and shared law enforcement’s view that the poisonings occurred at the store level.

In a war room equipped with a giant map that denoted where each victim bought a tainted bottle, the attorneys practiced how quickly they could pull apart the capsules, pour out the medicine and put them back together. It took most of them about 30 seconds, Demetrio said.

But the families quickly grew tired of theories, he said. They wanted answers about who was responsible for the death.

Neither Demetrio nor law enforcement had any.

“And every time a so-called lead was announced, or a potential suspect was announced, I would get a phone call and they would ask me what I thought,” Demetrio said. “I would constantly caution them not to get too high or too low. I made it clear to them that there was a law enforcement army out there trying to solve these murders.”

The lawsuit, Demetrio said, helped the families understand why Tylenol was susceptible to tampering. But civil cases can only do so much.

“They wanted to know who poisoned the pills, and the police could never definitively say,” he said. “And unfortunately, for the families, they still don’t have any concrete answers.”

Though Tylenol regained the public’s trust, several relatives and friends of the victims told the Tribune they still avoid taking it. A few said they habitually check to see if the seals on bottles are intact; others make sure — when grabbing any item off a shelf — to pick the one farthest back in case those in front have been tainted.

Joseph Janus, whose two younger brothers and new sister-in-law were among the victims, said he doesn’t even like to go into pharmacies and see Tylenol displayed on shelves.

He and his daughter, Monica, said the safety packaging on medicines, food and other grocery items that resulted from their family tragedy is a double-edged sword. Tamper-evident packaging has become such a part of the American consumer experience that they can’t open a sealed jar of peanut butter or a gallon of milk without thinking about the killings.

It’s a near-daily reminder that although the deaths led to a great public benefit, they came at a deep personal cost.

“You look at it and you’re like, ‘That’s because of them,’ ” Monica Janus said of her slain uncles and aunt. “Unfortunately, it happened to our family, but it saved many lives.”

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Case Study: Johnson & Johnson’s Award-Winning Supply Chain Smart Factory

Johnson & Johnson successfully pilots a scalable smart factory strategy to modernize operations and transform how digital capabilities are incorporated  

Company Fact File –

Company : Johnson & Johnson Sector : Health Care Products HQ location: New Brunswick, NJ Revenues : $10 billion+ annually Employees: 5,000+ Web url: www.jnj.com

Health care is a vital part of humanity, and Johnson & Johnson is committed to changing its trajectory by addressing patient, consumer, and customer needs. To accomplish this ambitious goal requires a high degree of visibility, flexibility and resiliency in the manufacturing operation.

Because the external environment has a dynamic impact on production, J&J developed a smart factory strategy that modernizes site operations by building digitally enabled capabilities to solve information, process, product, and human pain points. The smart factory is built upon a cohesive plan and foundation using data along with capabilities such as edge/high performance computing (HPC), process data mining/analytics, asset optimization, AR and VR mobility platforms, and modular systems that are threaded across the value chain – all designed to help optimize flow, improve reliability, resiliency and agility, while ensuring quality and safety.

The Journey to Smart

Many digitalization elements of J&J processes, digital stack, and standard data architecture and design supporting the smart factory began in 2017. Foundational programs like the development of a common data layer architecture, cloud environments, cybersecurity, ERP design, and a next generation manufacturing system platform are needed to ensure access to required data that will enable digital capabilities and solutions that will support processes, people and technologies.

“You can’t look at the individual technologies level,” says Bart Talloen, J&J’s Senior Vice President Supply Chain Strategy, Innovation and Deployment. “It’s all about the ultimate integrated capability for the business that you enable. The interoperability – system thinking – is fundamental because all the elements are interconnected.”

In the first quarter of 2021, the J&J Consumer business segment sites in Lititz, Penn. (USA) and Bangkok, Thailand began the internal diagnostic and review processes for key product value streams and how smart factory initiatives could improve business processes to support the customer. The smart factory process required engagement from all levels of the site’s organization to establish and link short- and long-term business objectives, vision and metrics.

The process included six phases: 1.     Visioning 2.     Diagnostics 3.     Current to future state digital capability 4.     Prioritization 5.     Roadmap 6.     Business planning

The smart factory requires good planning in how investments are made, sequencing, and people skill analysis to ensure optimal performance, agility, and resiliency objectives are met.

Since its inception, the smart factory rollout was extended to two additional J&J consumer sites in the third quarter of 2021 and then deployed across the entire global manufacturing network in the first two quarters of 2022.

“One of the smart factory objectives is for information to flow easily and in an interconnected way that provides insights for faster and more productive decision-making.”

“The right deployment strategy is critical. It’s always important to start small, nimble – what we call test and learn experiments to test something out,” says Talloen. “Then you take the learnings from those test and learns, and that informs you about deployments strategies.”

The Smart Factory Impact

The J&J Smart Factory transformed how the company identifies, tests, and incorporates digital capabilities to solve process constraints including lead times, equipment and labor efficiency, logistics , and planning processes. The first effort was to build a methodology, or playbook, that ensured a common language, definitions, and approach to understanding the transactional flow within a site, across sites and relationships with other supply chain systems areas (planning, procurement, delivery, customer, and product development).

“Systems can work perfectly, everything can be automated, but at the end it’s still people that are core in the execution. It’s critical to deveop these new technology standards that are clearly articulated for not only operators, but mechanics, engineers, quality people, and planning people to really prescribe in a detailed way those standard operating principles,” Talloen says.

Each smart factory capability was taken into consideration so both data and solutions interacted via a digital thread with interconnection to each system. Traditional problem identification and solving by means of process excellence or lean methodologies identified individual pain points and connections. The smart factory strategy allowed teams to understand and visualize the entire transactional process flow and interconnection of people, equipment, processes, and technology.

From there, the J&J Smart Factory strategy drove how the J&J Operating System (JJOS) – the company’s process excellence system – and teams understood the end-to-end information flows on a deeper level, which illuminated not just the sheer number of transactions within the end-to-end information flow, but the high incidence of duplication brought on by disparate systems. The JJOS includes process excellence methodologies, tools, metrics, and performance management principles. In addition, teams were able to identify additional flow breakers that would have not been visible without the need to understand the current digital landscape. The exercise was a critical input to building a smart factory roadmap because one of the smart factory objectives is for information to flow easily and in an interconnected way that provides insights for faster and more productive decision-making, so that operators, supervisor and managers can focus on making products.

“The smart factory strategy enabled J&J to identify common issues that impact business segments, operations, and needs globally.”

Ultimately, identification of common information flow breakers will populate an expanding digital solutions use-case library. Meanwhile, the capability and skilling process of J&J’s people will enable scaling and accelerate lead time reduction and agility around the globe.

Transforming the Way J&J Addresses Challenges

Beginning with the first Consumer pilot sites in Lititz, Penn., and Bangkok, Thailand, the smart factory program helped the locations address business challenges in new ways. In 2021, supply chain disruptions drove new business challenges throughout Lititz’s warehousing and logistics business units. These challenges led the team to use the JJOS tools to diagnose flow disruptions and leveraged the smart factory framework to identify and implement digital solutions.

• Implementation of J&J’s inbound yard management system, YardView, created detailed trailer visibility and yard jockey movement history. The warehouse team built capabilities for enhanced metric reporting and dashboards driving down detention and service costs.
• A digital twin of the production lines and material movements was created to model flow and material handling between the warehouse and manufacturing lines. The event models identified new product flows and 95% of the site’s total volume was converted to a direct-to-truck loading strategy, decreasing on-hand finished goods inventory by more than 50%. This change in shipping pattern, directly from palletizer to truck, removed 14 days of lead time (LT) from the site to distribution center network.
• Outbound container utilization load building, LoadMax, was implemented for the site, increasing container utilization by 4%, reducing costs by 15%, and lowering carbon footprint by 500,000 kg of CO2 emissions. Through the smart factory program, both Consumer sites can now address flow, productivity, and sustainability challenges in day-to-day business and during the pandemic.
• Scheduling tools were developed to replace manual scheduling and create the digital thread linkage between production’s real time output with logistic arrangement.
• Deliver Lighthouse provided goods-in-transit visibility to downstream markets, and best control on order, inventory, and customer services.
• The next gen manufacturing systems platform development and implementation unlocked the value of information about flow breaks in the manufacturing area to accelerate product release and prevent human error.
• Digital citizen development is aiming to help employees resolve real pain points by utilizing no-code/low code solutions (Power Apps, Alteryx, Azure Machine Learning).
• Workforce digital capability building is a systemic approach to all site employees, teaching how the future digital capability looks through a competency assessment and skills-based learning. The competency gap will be mitigated by multi-method, online learning, hands-on coaching, and project assignments.

As a result, J&J Thailand delivered 25% lead time reduction, 15% productivity improvement, and a 20% carbon footprint optimization.

Scaling for Success

The smart factory strategy provides the means to visualize, react, design, and implement digital capabilities and solutions from site, to region, to network at scale. Powered by clear identification of needs and pain points through information and process excellence, IT technology, and value stream mapping, J&J has identified, tested, developed, and scaled multiple technologies across the manufacturing network and sites within the consumer practice by direct development of tools or by leveraging digital capabilities and technologies from other business units.

J&J has continued deployment of the smart factory strategy across the entire J&J consumer network of twenty-one internal manufacturing sites.

“We’re getting into a phase going forward, where we’re integrating end-to-end supply chain and the smart factory-like capabilities all the way from the connection to the supplier to the connection to the customer,” Talloen says.

“The right deployment strategy is critical. It’s always important to start small, nimble – what we call test and learn experiments.”

Further expansion of the smart factory strategy into J&J medical technology and pharmaceutical business segments also began in 2022. The J&J Smart Factory strategy has enabled shared learnings, scalability of technologies, acceleration of the technology decision process and clear global investment strategies across the three business segments.

The smart factory process and strategy has enabled teams across all of J&J to not only identify local or regional issues, but to identify common issues that impact all business segments, operations, and needs globally. It has provided insights and focus to establish standard approaches that can be leveraged at scale to deploy across the regions and sites. Capabilities and technologies can be scaled more readily, people skills advanced more rapidly, and savings and competitiveness increased.

In addition to earning High Achiever status in the Enterprise Integration and Technology category at MLC’s 2022 Manufacturing Leadership Awards program, the J&J Smart Factory strategy and deliverables have been acknowledged in many forums and recognitions:

• World Economic Forum (WEF) Lighthouse Award – J&J Helsingborg Site – Q2 2021
• World Economic Forum (WEF) Lighthouse Award – J&J Thailand Manufacturing Site – Q1 2022
• Association for Supply Chain Management (ASCM) Annual Conference – Q3 2021    M

About the author:

J eff Puma is Content Director for the Manufacturing Leadership Council.

• Español – América Latina
• Português – Brasil

Johnson & Johnson: Reimagining recruiting with Jibe and Google

About Johnson & Johnson

Johnson & Johnson, a Fortune 100 company, is a multinational manufacturer of medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and consumer packaged goods headquartered in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.

Jibe offers a candidate experience platform and recruiting software that enable companies to build better talent pipelines and fill jobs faster.

By tapping into Google’s search and machine learning capabilities via Cloud Talent Solution, Jibe helped Johnson & Johnson improve the usability and effectiveness of its career site.

Google cloud results.

• Returns more relevant search results and better job-to-candidate matches with Google Cloud Talent Solution
• Increases career site engagement with 45% more click-throughs
• Better job discovery for business critical roles leads to a 41% increase in high-quality job applicants per search
• A faster, more cost-effective recruiting and hiring process
• Able to measure job applicants’ feedback

41% increase in highly qualified applicants for business critical roles

Job seekers can often feel lost or disconnected—like the right opportunity is out there, but they don’t know where or how to look. Employers face a similar challenge when trying to attract the right candidates. Many companies, especially large enterprises, face a talent shortage across a range of critical roles.

For global companies like Johnson & Johnson (J&J), their online career website is an important recruiting tool. It’s the “front door” for talent that could make a vital difference in the company’s future and drive innovation for years to come. However, career sites are often underutilized. If a job seeker doesn’t find a good job match with a quick search, they will likely move on. Too often, that represents a lost opportunity for both the company and the job seeker that could have been avoided with better search results.

“Partnering with Jibe and using Cloud Talent Solution for our career site allows us to do a much better job matching opportunity to talent on a very large scale.”

While J&J receives approximately 1 million applications for 25,000 positions each year, the percent of applicants that were highly qualified for open positions was low. Although the company always has a variety of open jobs on its career site , it noticed that even when strong matches existed between online job seekers and available positions, search results often didn’t highlight or even display the right opportunities. The user interface wasn’t intuitive enough, and job seekers couldn’t easily find their ideal positions.

As J&J began to reevaluate recruiting to take a more relationship-centric and digitally-driven approach, the company began working with Jibe , a career-site solutions provider. Jibe introduced J&J to Cloud Talent Solution , which uses machine learning to better match job listings with job seekers’ interests and qualifications. Using Cloud Talent Solution, companies can build a compelling career-site search experience that helps candidates easily find the jobs most relevant to them. With smarter job searches and recommendations, J&J improved the effectiveness of its career site in just a few weeks.

“Jibe and Google make it easy for a large company to make a real difference in the candidate experience without investing a lot of time, money, or internal resources,” says Sjoerd Gehring, Global VP of Talent Acquisition at Johnson & Johnson. “Now that we’re using Cloud Talent Solution, our career site search results are exponentially better.”

Transforming job searches with better matches

Cloud Talent Solution better connects job seekers with jobs, because it understands the nuances of job titles, descriptions, industry jargon, and skills, matching job seeker preferences with relevant listings based on sophisticated classifications and relational models. It helps decipher job seeker queries and employer job postings, removing the manual effort of optimizing job content for search.

By using the Jibe platform to integrate Cloud Talent Solution with its career site, job seekers are more easily finding what they’re looking for and J&J is filling business critical roles more efficiently. Since integrating Cloud Talent Solution, J&J has seen a 41% increase in high-quality job applicants per search and a nearly 45% increase in click-through rate on its career site.

“Partnering with Jibe and using Cloud Talent Solution for our career site allows us to do a much better job matching opportunity to talent on a very large scale,” adds Sjoerd. “We’re able to take a more personal approach and really connect with job seekers, which is a win.”

“Today’s job seekers expect a prospective employer’s career site to work like the other cloud services they use. Using Google’s machine learning and artificial intelligence, we can help customers like J&J get better search results and return jobs that candidates are more likely to apply to.”

Connecting people with opportunities

J&J is now offering job seekers experiences in line with what they have come to expect as consumers—searching for a job should be as easy as searching for flights, restaurants, products, and other services. Because candidates are familiar with the experience, their level of interaction and engagement goes up, creating a larger pipeline of qualified candidates and filling jobs faster.

“Today’s job seekers expect a prospective employer’s career site to work like the other cloud services they use,” says Joe Essenfeld, Founder & CEO at Jibe. “Using Google’s machine learning and artificial intelligence, we can help customers like J&J get better search results and return jobs that candidates are more likely to apply to.”

A new digital revolution for recruiting

J&J continues to work with Jibe and Google to offer new features which make its career site even more effective. By offering job seekers a transformative, engaging experience, J&J is a more attractive and visible employer, increasing the value of its brand. It’s also continuously improving its recruiting process with end-to-end visibility and feedback from interactions with a million people every year.

“Transforming our career site with Jibe and Cloud Talent Solution directly impacts our ability to attract high-quality talent and hire those candidates faster,” adds Sjoerd. “Lots of people are looking for their dream job, and if it’s here at J&J, we want them to find it quickly and easily.”

• Learn how Cloud Talent Solution can help improve your own career site experience

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Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ) Notches Up after Talc Lawsuit Win

O ne of the biggest problems for healthcare firm Johnson & Johnson ( NYSE:JNJ ) in the last decade or so has been talc. This powder, which many swore by until a potential link between it and some cancers was discovered, has brought in huge sums for the company while dooming it to a series of lawsuits. In fact, Johnson & Johnson added modestly in Friday afternoon’s trading thanks to a win in a Florida court case on that very topic.

The latest case handed down the verdict that talc-based baby powder did not, in fact, cause cancer in a woman. The case was filed by the family of a woman from Sarasota County, Patricia Matthey, who died in 2019 after being a daily user of Johnson & Johnson’s talcum powder. Matthey was ultimately diagnosed with ovarian cancer in August 2016.

The jury found that the cancer was not generated by the use of talcum powder, and Johnson & Johnson’s worldwide vice president of litigation, Erik Haas, approved of this wholeheartedly. Haas noted, “Consistent with decades of scientific research, the jury appropriately found that talc is safe, does not contain asbestos, and does not cause cancer, which is the same outcome the company achieved in 16 of 17 ovarian cases tried to date.”

A Changing Playing Field

Meanwhile, the latest word out of the company’s earnings report revealed that the field is changing somewhat. Its sales of medical devices were on the decline, but it was seeing substantial gains in its cancer drugs. Its Stelara psoriasis drug is on the decline as well, but reports noted there was a bright spot in the Abiomed heart pump segment and in wound closure devices. However, Stelara’s sales were said to be down somewhat thanks to an upcoming loss of exclusivity that would change its position with healthcare providers.

Is JNJ a Buy Right Now?

Turning to Wall Street, analysts have a Moderate Buy consensus rating on JNJ stock based on six Buys and six Holds assigned in the past three months, as indicated by the graphic below. After a 7.13% loss in its share price over the past year, the average JNJ price target of $179.17 per share implies 21.42% upside potential.

JNJ also pays out a quarterly dividend, which yields 3.12% . This is above the healthcare sector ( XLV ) average of 1.49%.

Is JNJ the Right Stock to Buy for Passive Income? 

Before you hurry to invest in JNJ, think about the following: 

TipRanks’ team has built a Smart Dividend Stock Portfolio for investors, and Johnson & Johnson is not included. Our portfolio highlights companies that have been hand-picked for their potential to deliver significant passive income for years to come. 

> See Smart Dividend Portfolio

J&J wins trial over Florida woman who claimed its baby powder caused her cancer

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Evidence-based Approaches to Support Student Mental Health

• Andrea Feldman
• 24 April 2024

The college years throw a lot of new challenges at us. Maybe you’re the first in your family to go to college. You’re developing a new sense of independence. Figuring out how to live with roommates. Dealing with new financial responsibilities and academic pressures.

That’s a lot all by itself — but as Associate Professor Sam Rosenthal noted during her recent Health Equity lecture outlining the behavioral health of college-age students, a staggering 75% of mental health disorders are established by the mid-twenties. That means that the 18-25 cohort exhibits the highest rates of anxiety and depressive symptoms, and they’re also extremely vulnerable to developing parallel addictive behaviors.

“Those with social support reduce their risk of insomnia by 33%, their risk of anxiety by 47% and their risk of depression by 50%. That’s dramatic.”

But the data is only one side of the story, and Rosenthal prefaced her talk by noting, “I do want you to know we’re going to get to a positive note of the solutions by the end.” And it may not surprise you to learn that community-building — strengthening our real-world bonds to others — plays a crucial role in improving our individual mental health. (Put down that phone, while you’re at it.)

A Career Built on Studying Behavioral Health

Rosenthal has built an impressive career on her research into the multi-factor forces driving mental-health trends in young adults.

In addition to teaching and serving as the director of JWU’s Center for Student Research and Interdisciplinary Collaboration, she serves as an evaluator for the Rhode Island Department of Health and as the lead epidemiologist for the State Epidemiological Outcomes Workgroup (SEOW). Under the aegis of SEOW, she administers the RI Young Adult Survey (RIYAS), which focuses on the behavioral health of 18-25-year-olds.

Assessing the Pandemic Spike

Depression rates among young adults have doubled in the past 10 years. But the pandemic sent these rates soaring — Rosenthal calls the spike “extreme” — due to a polycrisis of factors, including social isolation, disrupted academic studies, and unprecedented loss. During the 2020-21 academic year, noted Rosenthal, 60% of college-age students reported at least one mental health disorder, and 75% experienced psychological distress. 1 in 5 young adults in Rhode Island reported losing a loved one to Covid-19.

Once you start taking into account the social upheaval of recent years — from gun violence to racial discrimination, climate change anxiety and political turmoil — and you have a massive amount of collective trauma having a ripple effect on already fragile mental health states.

Rosenthal provided a top-level overview of two recent studies. The Healthy Mind study surveyed more than 76,000 students from 400 institutions during the 2022-23 academic year. In October 2022, Rosenthal and her co-researchers used an NIH grant to survey 586 JWU students assessing their levels of depression, anxiety, insomnia and social support.

While the Healthy Mind study clocked depression rates at 41%, the JWU case study reported 53% — that’s “higher than what we saw in the national study, but actually comparable to what we saw in the Rhode Island state study,” explained Rosenthal. “And also we have a huge representation of sexual gender minority students, which is likely to be driving some of these higher rates for us as well.” (The JWU study demographics broke down as 15.1% cisgender male, 47.4% cisgender female and 37.5% sexual or gender minority.)

So, what are the solutions for combatting these numbers? For Rosenthal, who has done multiple studies correlating social media use and depression, building up social support networks is “critically important”: “Those with social support reduce their risk of insomnia by 33%, their risk of anxiety by 47% and their risk of depression by 50%. That’s dramatic.”

“Gratitude is really powerful. I often tell my students to break up anxiety with gratitude.”

Mindfulness, Quiet Hours & Other Mental Health Boosts

Rosenthal opened the conversation to students and faculty in the audience to share their ideas for boosting our community connections and strengthening overall well-being.

Sarah and Jasmine, two undergraduate students in the Public Health program , shared how much JWU’s 3-credit Mindfulness for Health & Wellbeing class helped them. (This course is currently an elective, but there is talk of making it requirement.)

The course provides students with the opportunity to learn the principles of mindfulness, develop their own mindfulness mediation practice, and apply principles of mindfulness to daily life.

Prior to taking the class, Jasmine had been struggling with time management. Having never meditated before, it took her some time to acclimate to the practice. But now, she says, “I feel like this class has definitely not only forced me to try new things, but I’ve made it a part of my daily routine. It’s definitely helped me!”

Initially, Sarah noted that she “had a really hard time sitting down with myself and going through [the process].” Gradually, with the guidance of Professor Jennifer Swanberg, “I've been able to develop my own practice that I find beneficial. There are those times where I still feel frustration, but now I feel more prepared to deal with it.”

In the Occupational Therapy department, faculty celebrate Grati-Tuesdays, where they keep a running list of what they are thankful for. “Gratitude is really powerful,” noted Assistant Professor Kathryn Burke. “I often tell my students to break up anxiety with gratitude. Thinking about something that you’re grateful for can sometimes help get your brain out of that downward spiral that everything is terrible.”

Other suggestions included:

• A peer mentorship program to help increase social support
• Moving 11:59pm assignment deadlines to 8pm
• Minimizing the number of early morning classes
• Enforcing quiet hours in residence halls
• Expanding the number of safe community spaces (like the Bridge for Diversity, Equity and Social Justice ) where students can share with their peers

“Creating a sense of belonging is crucially important,” concluded Rosenthal. “We need to have safe spaces to hold people when the rest of the world feels unsafe.”

JWU has a wealth of confidential mental health resources, including counseling services in Providence and Charlotte . Individual counseling sessions and consultations are available by appointment, as well as resources for mental health screenings, education and crisis intervention.

Related Reading:

6 Ways College Students Can Improve Their Mental Health

Self-Care Tips to Use During Exams

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A Democrat’s Case for Saving Mike Johnson

Why Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez wants to rescue the speaker from his own party

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Produced by ElevenLabs and News Over Audio (NOA) using AI narration.

If Speaker Mike Johnson keeps his job, it’ll be Democrats who save him. Like his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, the Louisiana conservative is facing an attempted ouster after he defied Republican hard-liners by relying on Democratic support to pass a funding bill—$61 billion for Ukraine, in this case—they hated.

Democrats helped boot McCarthy six months ago, but now several of them say they’ll rescue Johnson. Just three Republicans have signed on to the effort to depose Johnson, so the speaker might be able to survive with only a small Democratic contingent backing him. On the surface, the willingness of any Democrat to stand with Johnson might seem curious; he’s both more conservative than McCarthy and more loyal to Donald Trump. So why are some Democrats who voted to end McCarthy’s speakership planning to salvage Johnson’s?

Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington State is one of them. She was a 34-year-old co-owner of an auto-repair shop when she narrowly flipped a district in 2022 that had been held by a six-term Republican. In Congress, she co-chairs the centrist Blue Dog Coalition and recently helped write the aid package that the House approved in a series of bipartisan votes on Saturday, which included long-stalled money for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. In an interview one day before the vote, Gluesenkamp Perez drew a sharp contrast between McCarthy (a “classic suit calculating his next advancement”) and Johnson (“a man of faith”).

Anne Applebaum: The GOP’s pro-Russia caucus lost. Now Ukraine has to win.

“I don’t think my constituents wanted to see me save Kevin McCarthy. I think they saw a lot of hair gel,” Gluesenkamp Perez told me. “I think they see Mike Johnson as different. I think they want me to save him. They’re tired of chaos, regardless of party.”

Last month, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who ardently opposes sending more aid to Ukraine, introduced a motion to vacate the speaker—the same procedural maneuver that Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida deployed in October to remove McCarthy. The House is on recess this week, and Greene has vowed to bring the motion to a vote after lawmakers return if Johnson doesn’t resign (which he has insisted he won’t do).

Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House minority leader, hasn’t said whether he would urge Democrats to save Johnson. Some in the party first want to extract additional concessions from the speaker in the closely divided House. But Gluesenkamp Perez isn’t waiting for a directive from her leadership. She told me that Johnson has already earned her vote. “Putting this package forward is enough to demonstrate for me that he’s worth saving,” she said.

Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Russell Berman : If Marjorie Taylor Greene forces a vote on a motion to vacate, would you vote to save Speaker Johnson?

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez : I will not be voting to remove Mike Johnson.

Berman : Do you think Democrats should try to force Johnson into negotiations and extract more concessions from him before agreeing to save him?

Gluesenkamp Perez : I don’t think my community is invested in procedural rules and structure. I think my community cares about an America that exerts influence in support of democracies, and putting this package forward is enough to demonstrate for me that he’s worth saving.

I think Mike Johnson is a man of faith. I think he’s guided by that faith. I am also a woman of faith. And I understand and I respect that. The Southern Baptist Convention put out a letter where they said that they supported funding for Ukraine aid. After that, Mike Johnson [a Southern Baptist] came out in support of moving the military-aid package forward. I do not think that is a coincidence. I see a guy that is guided by conscience, guided by his faith.

Elaina Plott Calabro: The accidental speaker

I do not agree with Mike on many, many issues, but I did not see that level of conviction in Kevin. He had this sort of unctuous image. The reason that Kevin lost his job was that he voted to fund the government. That is an incredibly low bar. Funding the government is not showing courage. That’s just our job. Supporting our allies, supporting our values—that’s courage. And that's something that resonates much more strongly in my community.

Berman : Do you think your constituents see this situation differently from last fall with McCarthy?

Gluesenkamp Perez : It’s sort of inside baseball versus real-life policy. Funding the government—as I said, that’s the job. I don’t think my constituents wanted to see me save Kevin McCarthy. I think they saw a lot of hair gel. I think they see Mike Johnson as different. He has one of the lowest net wealths for a member of Congress. I think he actually likes his family. I think they want me to save him. They’re tired of chaos, regardless of party.

I had not been to D.C. since ninth grade before I got this job. I was similarly thrown into this very different world with very different responsibilities, and I empathize with the personal situation he’s in. He was not expecting to be speaker seven months ago. And all of a sudden he’s thrust into this massive job, and he’s figuring it out as he goes. To be clear, I think he’s made mistakes along the way. But I empathize with him in a way I could not with Kevin McCarthy, who was just this classic suit calculating his next advancement as a politician.

Berman : It sounds like you think he’s been a better speaker than McCarthy.

Gluesenkamp Perez : I don’t think Kevin would ever have put forward this package. And Mike has gone out on a limb to do it, because it reflects his values.

Berman : Supporters of Ukraine aid—both Republican and Democratic—have been pushing Johnson to put something like this package on the floor for months, and the delay has come at a significant cost to Ukrainian lives and territory . How much do you hold him responsible for not doing this much earlier?

Gluesenkamp Perez : In the cloakroom and around the Hill, there’s been a debate about whether Mike Johnson is Chamberlain or Churchill. I think, in the end, he’s manifesting the Churchill quote , “Americans will always do the right thing after they’ve exhausted every other option.”

Berman : Johnson is way more ideologically conservative than McCarthy was, particularly on social issues. How would you respond to people who would say that Johnson is actually more dangerous if you’re a Democrat or progressive, who would ask why you threw out the mainstream Republican but saved someone they consider to be a zealot?

Gluesenkamp Perez : I’m pretty confident that my district sees a difference between a drive for power and someone that’s doing his best. I’m not concerned that they’re going to confuse my values in a vote to support Mike and with my values in walking away from a machine that Kevin McCarthy represents.

Judge upholds disqualification of challenger to judge in Trump’s Georgia election interference case

DECATUR, Ga. — A judge upheld the disqualification of a candidate who had had planned to run against the judge presiding over former President Donald Trump’s 2020 Georgia election interference case .

Tiffani Johnson is one of two people who filed paperwork to challenge Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee. An administrative law judge earlier this month found that she was not qualified to run for the seat after she failed to appear at a hearing on a challenge to her eligibility, and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger adopted that decision.

Johnson last week filed a petition for review of that decision in Fulton County Superior Court. After all of McAfee’s colleagues on the Fulton County bench were recused, a judge in neighboring DeKalb County took up the matter and held a hearing Thursday on Johnson’s petition.

At the end of the hearing, DeKalb Superior Court Judge Stacey Hydrick upheld the decision that said Johnson is not eligible, news outlets reported. A representative for Johnson’s campaign did not immediately respond to an email Friday seeking comment.

The ruling leaves McAfee with a single challenger, civil rights attorney Robert Patillo, in the nonpartisan race for his seat.

With early voting set to begin Monday for the May 21 election, it’s likely too late to remove Johnson’s name from the ballot. The law says that if a candidate is determined not to be qualified, that person’s name should be withheld from the ballot or stricken from any ballots. If there isn’t enough time to strike the candidate’s name, prominent notices are to be placed at polling places advising voters that the candidate is disqualified and that votes cast for her will not be counted.

Georgia law allows any person who is eligible to vote for a candidate to challenge the candidate’s qualifications by filing a complaint with the secretary of state’s office within two weeks of the qualification deadline. A lawyer for Sean Arnold, a Fulton County voter, filed the challenge on March 22.

Arnold’s complaint noted that the Georgia Constitution requires all judges to “reside in the geographical area in which they are elected to serve.” He noted that in Johnson’s qualification paperwork she listed her home address as being in DeKalb County and wrote that she had been a legal resident of neighboring Fulton County for “0 consecutive years.” The qualification paperwork Johnson signed includes a line that says the candidate is “an elector of the county of my residence eligible to vote in the election in which I am a candidate.”

Administrative Law Judge Ronit Walker on April 2 held a hearing on the matter but noted in her decision that Johnson did not appear.

Walker wrote that the burden of proof is on the candidate to “affirmatively establish eligibility for office” and that Johnson’s failure to appear at the hearing “rendered her incapable of meeting her burden of proof.”

Walker concluded that Johnson was unqualified to be a candidate for superior court judge in the Atlanta Judicial Circuit. Raffensperger adopted the judge’s findings and conclusions in reaching his decision to disqualify her.

A lawyer Johnson, who said in her petition that she has since moved to Fulton County, argued that Johnson failed to show up for the hearing because she did not receive the notice for it.

Without addressing the merits of the residency challenge, Hydrick found that Johnson had been given sufficient notice ahead of the hearing before the administrative law judge and concluded that the disqualification was proper.

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Judge upholds disqualification of challenger to judge in Trump’s Georgia election interference case

FILE- Fulton County Superior Judge Scott McAfee presides over a hearing, March, 1, 2024, in Atlanta. DeKalb Superior Court Judge Stacey Hydrick on Thursday, APril 25, 2024, upheld the disqualification of Tiffani Johnson, a candidate who had had planned to run against McAfee. (AP Photo/Alex Slitz, Pool, File)

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DECATUR, Ga. (AP) — A judge upheld the disqualification of a candidate who had had planned to run against the judge presiding over former President Donald Trump’s 2020 Georgia election interference case .

Tiffani Johnson is one of two people who filed paperwork to challenge Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee. An administrative law judge earlier this month found that she was not qualified to run for the seat after she failed to appear at a hearing on a challenge to her eligibility, and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger adopted that decision.

Johnson last week filed a petition for review of that decision in Fulton County Superior Court. After all of McAfee’s colleagues on the Fulton County bench were recused, a judge in neighboring DeKalb County took up the matter and held a hearing Thursday on Johnson’s petition.

At the end of the hearing, DeKalb Superior Court Judge Stacey Hydrick upheld the decision that said Johnson is not eligible, news outlets reported. A representative for Johnson’s campaign did not immediately respond to an email Friday seeking comment.

The ruling leaves McAfee with a single challenger, civil rights attorney Robert Patillo, in the nonpartisan race for his seat.

With early voting set to begin Monday for the May 21 election, it’s likely too late to remove Johnson’s name from the ballot. The law says that if a candidate is determined not to be qualified, that person’s name should be withheld from the ballot or stricken from any ballots. If there isn’t enough time to strike the candidate’s name, prominent notices are to be placed at polling places advising voters that the candidate is disqualified and that votes cast for her will not be counted.

Georgia law allows any person who is eligible to vote for a candidate to challenge the candidate’s qualifications by filing a complaint with the secretary of state’s office within two weeks of the qualification deadline. A lawyer for Sean Arnold, a Fulton County voter, filed the challenge on March 22.

Arnold’s complaint noted that the Georgia Constitution requires all judges to “reside in the geographical area in which they are elected to serve.” He noted that in Johnson’s qualification paperwork she listed her home address as being in DeKalb County and wrote that she had been a legal resident of neighboring Fulton County for “0 consecutive years.” The qualification paperwork Johnson signed includes a line that says the candidate is “an elector of the county of my residence eligible to vote in the election in which I am a candidate.”

Administrative Law Judge Ronit Walker on April 2 held a hearing on the matter but noted in her decision that Johnson did not appear.

Walker wrote that the burden of proof is on the candidate to “affirmatively establish eligibility for office” and that Johnson’s failure to appear at the hearing “rendered her incapable of meeting her burden of proof.”

Walker concluded that Johnson was unqualified to be a candidate for superior court judge in the Atlanta Judicial Circuit. Raffensperger adopted the judge’s findings and conclusions in reaching his decision to disqualify her.

A lawyer Johnson, who said in her petition that she has since moved to Fulton County, argued that Johnson failed to show up for the hearing because she did not receive the notice for it.

Without addressing the merits of the residency challenge, Hydrick found that Johnson had been given sufficient notice ahead of the hearing before the administrative law judge and concluded that the disqualification was proper.

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Did Boris Johnson really sabotage peace talks between Russia and Ukraine? The reality is more complicated

A recent study shows the reasons the 2022 talks failed are more nuanced than critics suggest. Compromise may still be possible

T he war in Ukraine will be a source of fascination and study for historians for decades to come. Even today, two years in, we’re starting to see research into some of the big moments that characterised the early days of the conflict, and which sheds light on the confusing welter of news stories that emerged at the time. Military analysts, for example, have already been able to reconstruct some of the most critical battles of the war’s early days, showing how contingent and critical Russia’s failure to establish a beachhead at Hostomel airport near Kyiv was to the course of the war, when history could easily have gone down a different path.

Another study, published last week by the historian Sergey Radchenko and the political scientist Samuel Charap, focuses on the poorly understood but consequential peace negotiations that played out between Russia and Ukraine in the spring of 2022 over ending the conflict. These negotiations – held predominantly in Istanbul – have become a focus for critics of the war in the US, who often argue that the west, and particularly then British prime minister, Boris Johnson, sabotaged these negotiations and prevented a successful ceasefire. Vladimir Putin would go on to make a similar argument in his now infamous interview with Tucker Carlson .

As Charap and Radchenko show, the reality is a bit more complicated. Johnson didn’t directly sabotage a ceasefire deal in spring 2022; indeed, there was no deal ready to be signed between Russia and Ukraine. The two sides hadn’t agreed on territorial issues, or on levels of military armaments permitted after the war. Ukraine’s position during the negotiations necessitated security guarantees that western states were hesitant to provide. And there were domestic political questions inside Ukraine related to Russian demands about “denazification” to contend with.

At the same time, the article shows that many of the opposing narratives – that neither Ukraine nor Russia are willing to negotiate, or that Ukraine’s Nato membership isn’t important to Russia – are also false. The two sides were able to agree on some major concessions, mostly around the question of the postwar European security order, and they were willing to talk, even in the face of a brutal ongoing war. And although there are other reasons why the talks failed, the promise of western commitments undoubtedly did play a role in undermining the Ukrainian willingness to come to an agreement at that time.

In short, the history of why these talks failed can be helpful for undermining the absolutist narratives that have come to dominate conversations about the war – and for thinking about the future of the conflict.

First, the narrative that Charap and Radchenko present highlights clearly that both Russians and Ukrainians thought the question of Ukrainian “alignment” was important. Would Ukraine be allowed to belong to Nato, or the European Union ? Would Ukraine become a neutral country, and what might that mean for its ability to defend itself? Many of Ukraine’s strongest supporters in Washington and in eastern Europe have repeatedly argued that Nato expansion and the issue of Ukraine’s potential accession to the alliance had nothing to do with Russia’s choice to invade, which they typically attribute to cultural chauvinism or imperial delusions. Yet during the earliest concrete negotiations on this topic, both sides focused not on territorial settlements, but on the big picture postwar strategic questions. Clearly, they believed these questions were important.

Second, this history refutes the notion that neither Ukraine nor Russia is willing to negotiate, or to consider compromises in order to end this war. Some western supporters of Ukraine point to extreme statements by Russian elites to argue that there can be no negotiated end to this conflict – Russia will never be satisfied until it is victorious. Yet these early negotiations clearly disprove that point. Both sides presented their demands, and traded drafts back and forth with concessions on certain issues. Clearly, they never reached a final deal. But there were already visible concessions occurring during this process, from Russia’s suggestion that Crimea’s status might be open to negotiation, to the back and forth between the two sides on the size of a postwar Ukrainian army.

For those who study political science, this is common to many conflict-related negotiations. Both sides in a war will have preferences and interests, and any peace process must grapple with resolving those competing points of view. The war in Ukraine is not unique or immune to these dynamics. The early negotiations may have failed, but it shows that, in a future window of opportunity, compromise might be possible.

A third and more important point – particularly for those of us in the west – is that the history of the Istanbul negotiations does highlight the somewhat hollow nature of the “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine” slogans so favoured by western policymakers. Bomb-throwers like Elon Musk are technically wrong when they claim that the west torpedoed a concrete peace agreement in spring 2022; they are right in a broader philosophical sense, however, that the scepticism of western leaders about Russian intentions, their commitment to aid Ukraine and their encouragement to Kyiv to fight on all added to the decision of the government to continue to fight rather than negotiate.

Again, this is not particularly surprising to those who have followed the conflict closely. But it does suggest that western leaders should stop implying that there are no divergent interests between Ukraine and its western backers. If western policymakers can step in to persuade Ukrainian leaders to fight on in 2022, they can offer advice about entering into negotiations in 2024 or beyond. As Adam Smith, the Democrat who runs the House armed services committee, put it recently , this is at best disingenuous: “I’ve heard this phrase – ‘nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine’. Forgive me. That is a ridiculous thing for any US diplomat or person in US policy to say. We got partners all over the world and, yes, we listen to them, but when we’re footing the bill, when we are spending so much money over there, we have a say.”

Charap and Radchenko’s history is not without its problems. The authors themselves – perhaps fearful of overstepping the mark – pull their punches too much when analysing why the talks failed. For the authors simply to state that multiple factors contributed to the failure of the talks is unsatisfying, given the obvious implication that Ukraine – encouraged by western backing – decided to roll the dice on the future of the conflict.

But the blame game ultimately matters less than what this account reveals about what all the parties think about the endgame of the Ukraine war; though it’s a history of failed negotiations, it can help to disprove some of the narratives that stand in the way of future talks between Ukraine and Russia, and help us understand the areas that are open to negotiation – and the issues that will be far tougher to resolve.

Emma Ashford is a senior fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy programme at the Stimson Center, Washington DC

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here .

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