Recalling all 24 OTC eye-drop lines after an extortion threat (2000)

Emptying the shelves before anyone was harmed

What makes this decision unusual is that Santen moved not because a fault had been found in its own product, but because a crime had been announced from outside. Whether anything had actually been introduced into the bottles was unknown, and not a single case of harm was ever reported. Santen nonetheless declined to narrow the recall to particular lots, covered all 24 products shipped since February 1998, and began pulling them the day after the threat arrived. It was a decision to take the goods that carried its revenue off the shelves itself, with nothing confirmed.

Contemporary opinion split. Some cited it as a model response to a crisis brought in from outside; others objected that a total recall would set a precedent, forcing the same answer every time a similar threat was made. Both readings have a case, and no trace survives of Santen weighing the two outcomes at the time. What is on record is that two years after the recall began on 15 June 2000, the company was counted among the sixty listed firms that had gone through the twelve post-bubble years without a single decline in sales.