Former Johnson & Johnson CEO Burke dies at 87

TRENTON, N.J. — Former Johnson & Johnson CEO James E. Burke, who steered the health care giant through the Tylenol poisonings in the 1980s that resulted in the first tamper-resistant product packaging, has died.

The company said Burke died late Friday at the age of 87, after a long, unspecified illness.

Burke, who ran the New Brunswick, N.J., company for 13 of his 37 years there, also had a big impact in his second career, as chairman of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America for 16 years.

He persuaded TV stations, newspapers and other media outlets to run free ads, produced for free by advertising agencies, warning of the dangers of illicit drugs. In one of the most memorable ads, an announcer intoned, “This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs,” as an egg was cracked and then sizzled away in a hot frying pan.

Burke helped make drug abuse a high-profile national concern when the issue was just starting to gain traction after First Lady Nancy Reagan's “Just Say No” campaign. At the peak, about $1 million a day worth of free ads against drug abuse were running, said Steve Dnistrian, who worked with Burke for 14 years at the partnership.

“As a corporate leader, Jim Burke put the welfare of his customers ahead of his company. As a citizen, he put the welfare of his country ahead of himself. It's a pity we have so few Jim Burkes,” said Allen Rosenshine, vice chairman of the group, now called The Partnership at DrugFree.org.

In a rare honor for a CEO, Burke was awarded the prestigious Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country's highest civilian award, in 2000 by President Bill Clinton, for both his corporate and civic leadership.

The Vermont native grew up in Slingerlands, a small town in upstate New York. Serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II, he commanded a landing craft tank in the Pacific. Burke then resumed his education, graduating from College of the Holy Cross in 1947 and Harvard Business School in 1949.

He started at J&J in 1953 as a product director and became president in 1973. He served as chief executive and chairman from 1976 through 1989.

Over that time, Johnson & Johnson's annual sales more than tripled to $9 billion, net income increased nearly fivefold and the company expanded its operations from 37 to 54 countries, turning it into a true global health care conglomerate.

The most memorable part of his tenure, though, came when someone laced capsules of pain reliever Tylenol with cyanide in 1982. Seven people in Chicago and its suburbs died over three days beginning Sept. 29, 1982. The perpetrator still has not been found.

Dnistrian, now vice president for communications at Johnson & Johnson, recalled “pandemonium,” with police in Chicago riding around with bullhorns warning people not to take Tylenol.

“Burke in a pretty dramatic press conference said the company had decided to seize all Tylenol capsules,” Dnistrian told The Associated Press. “He pulled 32 million bottles of Tylenol off the shelves (nationwide), resulting in a cost to the company in excess of $100 million.”

“There was just no other way to guarantee public safety,” he recalled Burke as saying.

The incident led to the introduction of packaging with plastic or foil seals to prevent people from tampering with medical products and even food, as well as the replacement of Tylenol capsules, which could easily be pulled apart and altered, with the caplets common today.

“To be as transparent as the company was throughout that crisis was just extraordinary,” Dnistrian said. He noted that initially there was speculation the capsules had been poisoned inside a Johnson & Johnson manufacturing plant, rather than after they were distributed.

Tylenol was one of Johnson & Johnson's top-selling products back then, in an era before today's blockbuster medicines with sales of well over $1 billion year.

“Everybody thought the product was finished, and then it was reintroduced,” Dnistrian said.

Sales soon recovered. However, there was a single copycat Tylenol poisoning in 1986, also still unsolved, that resulted in the death of one person in West Chester County, N.Y.

Johnson & Johnson's handling of the original Tylenol scare was so perfect that it became a textbook case in Harvard business school classes.

After retiring from Johnson & Johnson, Burke became chairman of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. He served there until 2005 but remain involved with the group after that.

Burke used his many contacts in the media industry, including his brother Daniel Burke, who helped build Capital Cities/ABC Inc. into a huge company, to generate support for the partnership.

Burke and his wife, Didi, who survives him, were longtime residents of Princeton, N.J. He is also survived by a sister, son, daughter and four grandchildren.

A private family funeral is planned in the Princeton area and public memorials likely will be held in New Brunswick and New York, according to Dnistrian.