#Me when cause and effect in history: 😁😁🫶🫶‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️😍😍😍🙏🙏🙏🤭🤭🤭😘😘😘

[uncertaininnit]

will u tell the class abt the tylenol murders

oh god oh geez okay YES! I had to instantly pause the YouTube video that I had playing in the corner of my screen as soon as I saw that I got this ask in my activity feed. the details like the year aren’t ingrained in my brain so I’m going to do a little googling to answer this question but most of it is stuff I remember and so some of it might not be 100% true but !! It’s really interesting

In September 1982, over the span of a week, 7 people living in the Chicago area died after taking Tylenol pills that were spiked with cyanide.

someone had gone to a pharmacy in chicago (it might have been two) and subtly replaced or spiked or whatever (idk how you deal with cyanide) the pills of at least 5 bottles of tylenol an out them back on the shelves completely normal looking.

this is the reason pretty much all food and medication you buy has a plastic seal on it to indicate if it’s been opened before. Before the Chicago Tylenol murders that wasn’t a thing pretty much at all

Nothing like this had ever happened before and there were a few copycat killers after the fact but as far as I’m aware they never caught the killer just because they didn’t have any kinds of precautions set for an event like that

after the deaths were all traced back to the spiked Tylenol, it was taken off of shelves nationwide and was really bad for Tylenol (duh). rival companies were accused of doing it to hurt Tylenol and I think there was also evidence against the Tylenol ceo? I would suggest watching the buzzfeed unsolved video (that’s where I first heard of this) for more info about the suspects and everything but that’s not really what I remember

I think at least one of the people who died was a child. An especially tragic story is (details here are probably a little wrong) a family was all together in one house and they were gathered for MAYBE a funeral I don’t know when one of them got a headache and went to take a Tylenol, and the like 2 minutes later passed out on the living room floor dead.

obviously not great for that to happen, imagine your uncle passed out dead on the floor of the living room. This might cause confusion and stress, leading to maybe someone developing a headache. And taking a Tylenol.

since they didn’t know the Tylenol was responsible, another family member took one and also died. That’s two deaths in the family within like 15 minutes.

I think it was someone from that same family who figured out that it was the Tylenol- since both of them had taken one and I think the second family member made a comment about it smelling like almonds (which is a common way to id cyanide, apparently it smells like almonds)

I feel like this isn’t as detailed as you were hoping bc I’m obviously not an expert but I think it’s so interesting !! It’s like how 9/11 led to the airport changes, but it’s much lesser known even though food that you have to remove seals from is way more regular than going to the airport.

It really is a great example of how literally everything and every rule of the world around us comes from mistakes. Learning from things and sometimes tragedies

#Me when cause and effect in history: 😁😁🫶🫶‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️😍😍😍🙏🙏🙏🤭🤭🤭😘😘😘 #Obviously I’m not happy people died it’s just so damn fascinating #Asks #Probablypercyjackson #Tysm for asking I wasn’t expecting it but it’s fun getting to share stuff like this