Thursday afternoon lawmakers released documents to the public suggesting Johnson & Johnson, the makers of Tylenol products, may have been aware of the problems with their product that forced over 135 million bottles of Children’s Tylenol, Infant’s Motrin, Zyrtec, Benadryl and adult Tylenol products to be recalled early in 2010.

Evidence gathered during an investigation into the recall by the Food and Drug Administration now seems to suggest Johnson & Johnson may have been aware the quality issues that affected the products, and there is also evidence the corporation possibly tried to remove the tainted products from shelves before the recall was issued.

According to CNN, Johnson & Johnson hired subcontractor WIS to buy the affected drugs from store shelves long before the recall was issued. Documentation (an email from June 2009,) seems to confirm the company was planning a secret recall of their Children’s Tylenol product months before the actual recall was issued. In essence, that means that despite efforts to secretly pull product from the shelves, consumers were still exposed to the product, which was not actually recalled until April 2010.

One has to wonder; did Johnson & Johnson knowingly expose consumers to their tainted products?

In their press releases about the recall, Johnson & Johnson and McNeil Consumer Health Care noted that the affected drugs possibly contained trace amounts of 2,4,6-tribromoanisole (TBA), which omitted a musty, moldy smell reported by consumers. While they noted in recall press releases that TBA was unlikely to cause serious physical harm to those who’d taken it, knowing now the possibility of their awareness of this issue months before the fact is more than just a little disconcerting.

I get a lot of flack for my distrust of drug companies. After all these corporations work very hard to market drugs designed to make the quality of our lives better–but at what cost? Learning that they tried to keep this imperative information from the general public by pulling the drugs off the shelves before the recall does very little to reinstate my trust.

As of Thursday, Johnson & Johnson was not available to comment on the allegations, but a second investigative hearing into the situations is scheduled for September 30.

What will news like this mean for Johnson & Johnson? As a consumer, I can tell you I will be less-likely to buy their products because not knowing if I can trust them or their wares makes me feel uneasy. Even if the trace amounts were deemed unlikely to cause serious medical problems, the fact that they knew about it for nearly a year before alerting the general public is very disconcerting.