No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson

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Synopsis

An incendiary, deeply reported exposé of Johnson & Johnson, one of America’s oldest and most trusted pharmaceutical companies—from an award-winninginvestigative journalist

One day in 2004, Gardiner Harris, early for a flight, sat down at an airport bar and started talking to the woman on the barstool beside him. She was a drug sales rep for Johnson & Johnson, and her horrific story about unethical sales practices and the devastating impact they’d had on her family fundamentally changed the nature of how Harris covered the company—and the entire pharmaceutical industry—for The New York Times. His subsequent investigations and ongoing research since that very first conversation led to new federal laws and ultimately to this book, a blistering exposé of a trusted American institution and the largest healthcare conglomerate in the world.

Harris takes us light years away from the company’s image as the child-friendly “baby company” as he uncovers reams of evidence showing decades of deceitful and dangerous corporate practices that have threatened the lives of millions. He covers multiple disasters: lies and cover-ups regarding baby powder’s linkage to cancer, the surprising dangers of Tylenol, a criminal campaign to sell dangerous antipsychotics to children, a popular drug used to support cancer patients that actually increases the risk that cancer tumors will grow, and deceptive marketing efforts that accelerated opioid addictions through their product Duragesic (fentanyl) that rival even those of the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma. All told, J&J’s products have helped cause enduring drug crises that have contributed to the deaths of as many as two million people and counting.

Filled with shocking, infuriating, but utterly necessary revelations, No More Tears is a landmark work of investigative journalism that lays bare the deeply rooted corruption behind the image of babies bathing with a smile.

Synopsis source: The StoryGraph

Review

Genre(s): NonFiction, Business, Investigative Journalism
HB&W Rating: 4 stars
View on StoryGraph, Goodreads
Buy on Barnes & Noble, Amazon

Like many, I remember studying the Harvard case study on the Chicago Tylenol murders in business school. I also remember walking out of that class thinking Johnson & Johnson was basically the gold standard for how a company should behave. Yeah… about that.

Truth be told, I finished this book weeks ago and didn’t even plan to write a full review. I figured I’d stick with the short paragraph I threw on Goodreads and StoryGraph. But it’s been sitting with me ever since, which usually means something got under my skin.

Of the many morally and legally questionable things laid out here, I realized how little I actually knew. Beyond that case study, my awareness was pretty piecemeal: some vague parenting forum chatter back in 2014 when my youngest was a baby about baby powder and talc (I definitely did not know about the asbestos issue at the time), those lawyer ads about pelvic mesh implants that you half-ignore until you don’t. I never connected any of it. Harris does, and the picture he paints is terrifying. He ties a lot of these threads back to Johnson & Johnson in various ways, either directly, through subsidiaries, or via behind-the-scenes roles—including its involvement in the Opioid epidemic in the United States.

I think a lot of us want to believe that companies are doing their due diligence before putting products into the world, especially ones that market themselves as family-friendly. This book made me question that assumption.

Also: there is a lot of information in here. Harris makes some pretty serious claims, but he backs them up with extensive reporting. I listened to this one on audiobook, which is read by the author and is great, but I think this may be better read than listened to so that one can take their time with that data. It can feel overwhelming at times, but he does a solid job of connecting the dots. At best, what emerges is negligence on a massive scale; at worst, a pattern of prioritizing profits over people. Either way, between the opioid crisis and allegations of downplaying risks and misleading the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), it’s hard to come away feeling great about any of it.

He also digs into J&J’s long, very cozy, and often scrutinized relationship with the FDA, full of lobbying and influence over time. I wasn’t exactly under the illusion that the FDA has everything under control, but this book chipped away at even the benefit of the doubt I still had. We’re supposed to trust that these agencies are looking out for us. This book definitely complicates that.

Well-researched, unsettling, and the kind of book that sticks with you whether you want it to or not. How Johnson & Johnson has managed to hold onto such a wholesome reputation through all of this is wild.

Until next time,

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