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Local author exposes Johnson & Johnson's dark history
No More Tears may make you weep
If you search for “Johnson & Johnson Baby Powder” on Wikimedia Commons, you will find the above image from an old edition of The Canadian Nurse, the official organ of the Canadian Nurses' Association. The text accompanying that image reads, “The majority of pediatricians say that all a baby powder can do is protect and lubricate a baby’s skin. It is in this modest but essential work of protection that Johnson’s Baby Powder excels. No germicidal or medicinal claims are made for this powder. If you will just slip a little Johnson’s Baby Powder between your fingers, youll feel the difference between Johnson’s and other powders. It is made from the finest talc obtainable and mildly borated. No gritty particles — and no orris-root. It keeps the baby’s skin smooth, clear and unblemished. And as every nurse knows, such healthy skin is its own best protection against infection.”
What a wonderful product. What a gift to mothers and babies everywhere. Except it really wasn’t, thanks to the asbestos in that “finest talc obtainable.” According to asbestos.com, in March of this year, Johnson & Johnson asked a Texas judge to approve a $10 billion trust fund for people with talc-related gynecological cancers. That’s after establishing an over $6 billion trust fund in August of 2024 to settle asbestos talc lawsuits brought against it in the U.S., and after offering $700 million to 24 states in June of 2024 to resolve accusations of misleading consumers regarding the safety of its talc-based products.
If you visit the Johnson & Johnson website, you can read the company’s credo, crafted by Robert Wood Johnson, the company’s chairman for over 30 years, just before J&J went public in 1943. Its first paragraph opens, “We believe our first responsibility is to the patients, doctors and nurses, to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services.” But its last paragraph opens, “Our final responsibility is to our stockholders.” And according to the new book No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson, exquisitely written by San Diegan Gardiner Harris and bravely published by Penguin Random House, that latter responsibility ultimately held sway.
The book has plenty of blurbs already, but I’ll provide one of my own: “A breathtaking descent into the depths of moral hell on a golden slide of money.” It’s a stunning exposé of corporate crimes that resulted in dead children, dead mothers, and women who didn’t get to have children because of the asbestos the company knew couldn’t be fully extracted from the talc in their baby powder. Switching to non-carcinogenic cornstarch wouldn’t just have been more expensive, it would have been an admission of guilt. So J&J kept selling asbestos-tainted baby powder, cajoling the industry into adopting a testing protocol they devised, which deliberately hid asbestos from results!
And the Baby Powder Fiasco was merely an appetizer to whet the corporate appetite. Writes Harris, ““For all intents and purposes, Johnson & Johnson was a criminal enterprise. Indeed, mafia families get a large share of their income from strictly legal activities. But no mafia outfit ever consistently targeted the kind of vulnerable people that J & J exploited…” Before long, they were bribing oncologists around the world to look the other way while a profitable J&J medicine, Procrit, turned out to be actually growing cancer tumors — in addition to causing heart attacks and strokes. And “long before the launch of Ortho Evra, Pinnacle metal-on-metal hip implants, and Prolift vaginal mash, executives knew those products would disable and kill. The FDA applications…contained blatant falsehoods. With Prolift, executives didn’t even bother lying to federal regulators - they just started selling without the agency’s approval…”
Gardiner Harris
If you think Purdue Pharma’s infamous Sackler family, with their 20,000 body count thanks to its opioids, is evil incarnate — well, those are rookie numbers. Harris puts the destruction wrought by J&J closer to two million. He writes, “The mental gymnastics needed to maintain any notion that the company was acting ethically became Olympian. J&J copied Purdue’s opioid playbook while Purdue was being widely derided as among the worst corporate criminals in history. Under the instructions of executives, its reps claimed that fentanyl was non-addicting — a more outrageous and dangerous sales pitch than any of Purdue’s.”
This isn’t sensationalism. The author has receipts, and more importantly, he has Grand Jury transcripts. When we sat down last week, Harris wouldn’t divulge exactly how he acquired sealed Grand Jury testimony. “I’ve got them” is all he’d say on the matter. But the damning transcripts provide a plethora of nails for J&J’s metaphorical coffin, and the author is adept with a hammer.
Full disclosure: I wept openly and often while reading this book of lives destroyed by corporate greed. Have a box of tissues nearby. I also found myself enraged. More than once, the word “murderers” came to mind, though Harris would surely disagree: “The goal, of course, was not to kill. Theirs was the ruthless, sociopathic indifference of bank robbers eliminating anyone between them and a vault of gold. Executives’ divergence from cardinal rules of polite society was sometimes revealed in court when simple questions about honesty and integrity seemed to flummox them.” But I kept thinking, If I’m driving your getaway car, and you shoot someone in the convenience store, I’m an accessory to that murder. Why is it different for Johnson & Johnson, a corporation with all the rights — yet seemingly none of the responsibilities — of a person?
If you read this book — and you should — you may find yourself feeling the same way. You may find those feelings growing stronger with each chapter. If that’s the case, I urge you to finish the book. Because it’s not just a portrait for evil; it’s also a roadmap for justice. After relentlessly hammering the reader with a long list of unconscionable corporate crimes, Harris pulls the ripcord and offers seven plans of action — including the wacky notion that perhaps the FDA should be funded by taxpayers it’s tasked with protecting, instead of the industry it’s ostensibly regulating. It is those taxpayers, after all, who have been the victims of J&J’s crimes. And at the risk of being branded “Captain Obvious”, Harris has the audacity to suggest that “companies and their executives must be punished for lying under oath to the FDA and federal courts.”
Before we parted, I asked Harris how he powered through five brutal years assembling this bewildering indictment of corporate greed.
His reply: “Anger.”
The author will be discussing his book in conversation with his friend Jon Cohen, April 10 at 7 pm at the San Diego Central Library.
Here's something you might be interested in.
Local author exposes Johnson & Johnson's dark history
No More Tears may make you weep
Local author exposes Johnson & Johnson's dark history
No More Tears may make you weep
If you search for “Johnson & Johnson Baby Powder” on Wikimedia Commons, you will find the above image from an old edition of The Canadian Nurse, the official organ of the Canadian Nurses' Association. The text accompanying that image reads, “The majority of pediatricians say that all a baby powder can do is protect and lubricate a baby’s skin. It is in this modest but essential work of protection that Johnson’s Baby Powder excels. No germicidal or medicinal claims are made for this powder. If you will just slip a little Johnson’s Baby Powder between your fingers, youll feel the difference between Johnson’s and other powders. It is made from the finest talc obtainable and mildly borated. No gritty particles — and no orris-root. It keeps the baby’s skin smooth, clear and unblemished. And as every nurse knows, such healthy skin is its own best protection against infection.”
What a wonderful product. What a gift to mothers and babies everywhere. Except it really wasn’t, thanks to the asbestos in that “finest talc obtainable.” According to asbestos.com, in March of this year, Johnson & Johnson asked a Texas judge to approve a $10 billion trust fund for people with talc-related gynecological cancers. That’s after establishing an over $6 billion trust fund in August of 2024 to settle asbestos talc lawsuits brought against it in the U.S., and after offering $700 million to 24 states in June of 2024 to resolve accusations of misleading consumers regarding the safety of its talc-based products.
If you visit the Johnson & Johnson website, you can read the company’s credo, crafted by Robert Wood Johnson, the company’s chairman for over 30 years, just before J&J went public in 1943. Its first paragraph opens, “We believe our first responsibility is to the patients, doctors and nurses, to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services.” But its last paragraph opens, “Our final responsibility is to our stockholders.” And according to the new book No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson, exquisitely written by San Diegan Gardiner Harris and bravely published by Penguin Random House, that latter responsibility ultimately held sway.
The book has plenty of blurbs already, but I’ll provide one of my own: “A breathtaking descent into the depths of moral hell on a golden slide of money.” It’s a stunning exposé of corporate crimes that resulted in dead children, dead mothers, and women who didn’t get to have children because of the asbestos the company knew couldn’t be fully extracted from the talc in their baby powder. Switching to non-carcinogenic cornstarch wouldn’t just have been more expensive, it would have been an admission of guilt. So J&J kept selling asbestos-tainted baby powder, cajoling the industry into adopting a testing protocol they devised, which deliberately hid asbestos from results!
And the Baby Powder Fiasco was merely an appetizer to whet the corporate appetite. Writes Harris, ““For all intents and purposes, Johnson & Johnson was a criminal enterprise. Indeed, mafia families get a large share of their income from strictly legal activities. But no mafia outfit ever consistently targeted the kind of vulnerable people that J & J exploited…” Before long, they were bribing oncologists around the world to look the other way while a profitable J&J medicine, Procrit, turned out to be actually growing cancer tumors — in addition to causing heart attacks and strokes. And “long before the launch of Ortho Evra, Pinnacle metal-on-metal hip implants, and Prolift vaginal mash, executives knew those products would disable and kill. The FDA applications…contained blatant falsehoods. With Prolift, executives didn’t even bother lying to federal regulators - they just started selling without the agency’s approval…”
Gardiner Harris
If you think Purdue Pharma’s infamous Sackler family, with their 20,000 body count thanks to its opioids, is evil incarnate — well, those are rookie numbers. Harris puts the destruction wrought by J&J closer to two million. He writes, “The mental gymnastics needed to maintain any notion that the company was acting ethically became Olympian. J&J copied Purdue’s opioid playbook while Purdue was being widely derided as among the worst corporate criminals in history. Under the instructions of executives, its reps claimed that fentanyl was non-addicting — a more outrageous and dangerous sales pitch than any of Purdue’s.”
This isn’t sensationalism. The author has receipts, and more importantly, he has Grand Jury transcripts. When we sat down last week, Harris wouldn’t divulge exactly how he acquired sealed Grand Jury testimony. “I’ve got them” is all he’d say on the matter. But the damning transcripts provide a plethora of nails for J&J’s metaphorical coffin, and the author is adept with a hammer.
Full disclosure: I wept openly and often while reading this book of lives destroyed by corporate greed. Have a box of tissues nearby. I also found myself enraged. More than once, the word “murderers” came to mind, though Harris would surely disagree: “The goal, of course, was not to kill. Theirs was the ruthless, sociopathic indifference of bank robbers eliminating anyone between them and a vault of gold. Executives’ divergence from cardinal rules of polite society was sometimes revealed in court when simple questions about honesty and integrity seemed to flummox them.” But I kept thinking, If I’m driving your getaway car, and you shoot someone in the convenience store, I’m an accessory to that murder. Why is it different for Johnson & Johnson, a corporation with all the rights — yet seemingly none of the responsibilities — of a person?
If you read this book — and you should — you may find yourself feeling the same way. You may find those feelings growing stronger with each chapter. If that’s the case, I urge you to finish the book. Because it’s not just a portrait for evil; it’s also a roadmap for justice. After relentlessly hammering the reader with a long list of unconscionable corporate crimes, Harris pulls the ripcord and offers seven plans of action — including the wacky notion that perhaps the FDA should be funded by taxpayers it’s tasked with protecting, instead of the industry it’s ostensibly regulating. It is those taxpayers, after all, who have been the victims of J&J’s crimes. And at the risk of being branded “Captain Obvious”, Harris has the audacity to suggest that “companies and their executives must be punished for lying under oath to the FDA and federal courts.”
Before we parted, I asked Harris how he powered through five brutal years assembling this bewildering indictment of corporate greed.
His reply: “Anger.”
The author will be discussing his book in conversation with his friend Jon Cohen, April 10 at 7 pm at the San Diego Central Library.
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