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It’s crazy to me that pills were just…out there. Like no foil seal on top, no cotton inside, just unscrew the lid and there they were.
It’s not clear where the cyanide in Tylenol came from. After the first incident, they sold the pills in sealed bubble packs for hospitals, but then there was another incident from one of those packs. So clearly, the cyanide came from the production facility. Also, at the time of the first incident, J&J CEO told media and FBI there was no cyanide present in the production facility, which was a lie. Cyanide was used to calibrate some equipment for QC inspection, and they had a kg bottle of it.
So likely all the poisonings were from a J&J employee, but the FBI went with the lone crazy theory and Ronald Reagan even gave the J&J CEO a medal and encouraged the country the drug was safe.
See doc on Netflix.
I don’t take ibuprofen often, but a couple months ago I opened my bottle, shook out 2 pills, and out popped a tiny plastic mammoth. I was very confused. Where had this tiny toy come from? Had it ALWAYS been in this bottle somehow? What kind of wacky assembly line accident could cause this?
I was telling my brother about it and he was like “I FORGOT that I put that in there! Bro it’s been like 3 years!”
Mystery solved. But yeah I was very confused and questioned all the other ibuprofen I had ever taken. I store it under my sink in a box, so not easily visible. Showed me how easy it would be for someone with ill intent to do something actually bad (as long as I trusted them enough to be in my house… which raises the bar pretty high for malice, but still…)
The little mammoth got to go back in the bottle, it lives there now.So that’s how it got there!
Scarier to think that there was at least one or more incidents of people injecting substances directly into food in grocery stores. Produce and meat are still pretty much kept out in the open with minimal protection against this.
that’s still how onions and lots of foods are sold - just lying around, anyone can go up and touch them, lace them, etc.
Its a good thing drugs are too expensive to use for such pranks i guess.
I don’t think replacing Tylenol pills with cyanide to kill people is “pranking” - this isn’t like drug-war moral panic around Halloween, this is more like serial killer territory. My point is that produce is like Tylenol used to be: accessible to be tampered with.
Pranking is not a good word for murder but “lacing random things so unexpected strangers get dosed” is such a delusional action its hard to describe.
it’s homicidal, I think that’s a good word for it - dosing random strangers with cyanide so they die is homicidal behavior 😅
In the literal sense that sounds correct but i feel like the act itself is so bizarre mentally ill that it becomes impossible to know what they where thinking or intended to do.
Would they even reliably know if someone died from it? Would they have had just much “fun” if they never knew about actual victims.
I just cant wrap my head around how someone ends up doing things like this, the trope that criminals come back to the crime is actually well known to often be true, the “kick” is derived from witnessing the damage and feeling powerful to have caused it.
It’s probably a good thing you can’t get inside the head of someone who would do this, but the reasons for it can be more reasonable than you would think - a lot of folks thought it was the Unabomber at first (including the FBI), but he confirmed he didn’t possess any cyanide.
Regardless, people come up with all sorts of reasons for actions like this - it doesn’t just have to be random or for fun, someone upset about lead poisoning in the water of poor and Black communities might justify poisoning random white Americans as a kind of terrorism to reach political goals, etc. - I dunno, maybe I find it easier to imagine justifications for poisoning random people (maybe I should be concerned, but I’m not).
EDIT: can’t wait for Trump’s FBI to use this to frame me as a violent extremist 😅
it goes without saying, poisoning random people is a poor way to reach your political ends; when the PKK started bombing teachers and schools, they lost a lot of support among the people they were supposed to be liberating, and ceded moral high ground. What once was justified violence against police and military targets as Kurdish liberation became a loathed terrorist group - violence is tricky as a political action, and can often bolster your enemies and push them to more extreme action, having the opposite of the desired effect (it can also lead to civil rights, protections like the 40 hour work week, and so on - so it’s not like violence is univalent).
In North America. In Europe, no one is allowed to touch produce.
Eh, I touched produce in three different European countries this year, right next to all other shoppers who did the same. Produce is out on the open, just ready and waiting to be you he’d because touching produce isn’t the problem
I just touched produce ~2 hours ago, in Ireland.
For certain values of Europe… I can attest it’s not that way in the Nordics
that’s so weird, is there still a way to determine if the produce is under or over ripe, to verify there isn’t damage, etc. before buying?
Yeah there is, just touch it because I don’t know what op is on, but touching produce being prohibited in Europe is nonsense
You look at it and you trust the seller to sort it.
God knows who touched produce with what fluids in NA grocery stores.
at least I get to add my fluids to the mix 😏
Peculiar time to post this.
