An issue with using BMI to measure obesity is that it provides a very limited picture. Professional athletes or heavily muscled people often have very high BMI’s, but are not obese or overweight. An athlete could have a high BMI, but a very low body fat percentage.

The hospitals policy is not illegal because weight is not covered under the employment discrimination guidelines of Texas. Texas laws only ban discrimination based on age, race, or religion.  Michigan is the only state that specifically forbids weight discrimination in hiring practices.  Six cities, including Washington DC, San Francisco, CA, Madison, WI, Santa Cruz, CA, Birmingham, NY, and Urbana, IL, also have some type of protection against weight discrimination.

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), passed in 1990, prohibits employers from discriminating against qualified individuals based on disabilities. A disability is defined as a “physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities.”  In 2008, amendments to the ADA were passed, widening the definition of what could be classified as a disability. Since the amendments, a few state and federal courts have addressed weight discrimination charges, but not many. A U.S. District Court in Florida gathered cases from all over the country regarding obesity discrimination and stated  “courts have uniformly held that obesity is not a qualifying impairment, or disability, unless it is shown to be the result of a physiological disorder.”

 The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is the federal agency responsible for enforcing anti-discrimination laws in the workplace. Complaints can be filed with the EEOC against employers, and investigators will look into the charge. The EEOC is responsible for the enforcement of parts of the ADA and all other statutes regarding employment discrimination. The interpretive guidance provided by EEOC stated “Title I of the ADA provided that “except in rare circumstances, obesity [was] not considered a disabling impairment.”

Rebecca Puhl, Ph.D., Director of Research at the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity at Yale University stated that over the past ten years, weight discrimination has seen a large increase. She said compared to other forms of discrimination, it was the third most common the women reported and the fourth most common for men. A Yale University Study found that weight discrimination occurs in interpersonal relationships and employment just as often as race discrimination. Some studies have found an economic penalty associated with obesity: Obese women earn up to 6% less than their thinner counterparts for the exact same job, men up to 3% less.

There is one method of legal workplace discrimination, known as a Bona Fide Occupational Qualifications (BFOQ). A BFOQ is a qualification for employment that is allowed to be considered during hiring and retaining of employees. These qualifications must be related to an essential job duty, and necessary for the particular place of employment. An example of this is mandatory ages of retirement for airplane pilots for safety reasons, and age caps for the hiring of police officers. Employers must prove that the requirements are necessary for the success of their business or the job before they can claim a BFOQ.

Workplace discrimination is an issue that has come up again and again, first seen a lot in the mid 1960s with regards to gender and race in particular. The most recent anti-discrimination law is the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008, which prevents discrimination based on genetic information of an applicant or employee. Obesity is rapidly becoming an epidemic in the U.S., today, over 30% of adults are considered obese. There have been a few cases of employees who sued their employers for weight discrimination, but a precedent has not yet been established for what the boundaries or regulations of this are. It is likely an issue that will continue to come up until national policies and regulations are enacted regarding weight.

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Testing of the recovered Tylenol bottles found that the capsules had been laced with approximately 65mg of the highly toxic compound potassium cyanide, nearly 10,000 times the amount to kill an average person. An investigation carried out by the FBI and local Chicago police department found that the tampered bottles came from different factories. Tampering in the initial production of the Tylenol capsules was ruled out since all of the deaths occurred in the Chicago area.

The original theory behind the crimes was a culprit who took the Tylenol bottles from drug and grocery stores in the Chicago area over a period of weeks, opened the capsules and added potassium cyanide, after which the culprit would return the bottles to the stores to be purchased. Due to the capsule form of the Tylenol, one could not tell the pills had been tampered with. To this date, the crimes remain unsolved.

Recently, Scott Bartz wrote an expose titled The Tylenol Mafia: Marketing, Murder, and Johnson & Johnson which explores a very different story of the murders and why the case was never closed. Bartz, a former Johnson & Johnson employee, had another theory in which the tampered Tylenol capsules were introduced at the manufacturer warehouses rather than being tampered and replaced in stores. He goes on to state that Johnson & Johnson later learned about this information and intentionally hid the evidence.

The expose compiles numerous sources of information, including the interviews of the victim’s families, FBI, local law enforcement, and prime suspects as well as undisclosed documentation that give rise to why the murders were never solved. Some problems that Bartz encounters include lack of evidence to support a culprit tampering with bottles in stores, the closely guarded distribution system by the makers of Tylenol, and the manipulation of facts by investigators. The inconsistencies that occurred with the production & distribution of the Tylenol capsules are believed to be due to the relationships of the company executives and their political motivations.

Update

In the years following the Tylenol murders, a number of copycat attacks occurred (ie. The 1986 Excedrin Tampering Murders). This led to tamper-resistant packaging and improved quality control of drug manufacturing through packaging reforms and the development of federal anti-tampering laws.

With new advances in forensic technology, the case is being re-investigated. A prime suspect at the time of the crimes was James W. Lewis, but police could not link him to the actual crimes.  In January 2009, Lewis’s home was searched for evidence and in 2010, he submitted DNA and fingerprints. The connection between Lewis and the murders is still being investigated.

On May 19, 2011, DNA samples were requested from Ted Kaczynski (The Unabomber) by the FBI. At the time of the crimes, Kaczynski’s parents lived in a Chicago suburb where he occasionally stayed. Kaczynski denies any connection to the murders.

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