An incendiary, deeply reported expos&eacute; of Johnson &amp; Johnson, one of America&rsquo;s oldest and most trusted pharmaceutical companies&mdash;from an award-winning< <investigative journalist.

Autorentext

Gardiner Harris previously served as the public health and pharmaceutical reporter for The New York Times and is now a freelance investigative journalist. He also served as a White House, South Asia, and international diplomacy reporter for the Times. Before that, he was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, covering the pharmaceutical industry. His investigations there led to what was then the largest fine in the history of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Previously, he was the Appalachian reporter for The Courier-Journal of Louisville, Kentucky. He won the Worth Bingham Prize for investigative journalism and the George Polk Award for environmental reporting after revealing that coal companies deliberately and illegally exposed miners to toxic levels of coal dust. Harris’s novel, Hazard, draws on his experience investigating these conditions. He has also been a Pulitzer Prize finalist with a team of others at the Times. He lives in San Diego, California.

Klappentext

**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An explosive, deeply reported exposé of Johnson & Johnson, one of America’s oldest and most trusted pharmaceutical companies—from an award-winning investigative journalist

“A damning portrait.”—Associated Press**

“A page-turning drama that raises life-or-death questions about the world’s largest healthcare conglomerate.”—Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of King: A Life

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD AND THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE • A CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY AND NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

One day in 2004, Gardiner Harris, a pharmaceutical reporter for The New York Times, was early for a flight and sat down at an airport bar. He struck up a conversation with the woman on the barstool next to him, who happened to be a drug sales rep for Johnson & Johnson. Her horrific story about unethical sales practices and the devastating impact they’d had on her family fundamentally changed the nature of how Harris would cover the company—and the entire pharmaceutical industry—for the Times. His subsequent investigations and ongoing research since that very first conversation led 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 the link of Johnson’s Baby Powder to cancer, the surprising dangers of Tylenol, a criminal campaign to sell antipsychotics that have cost countless lives, a popular drug used to support cancer patients that actually increases the risk that cancer tumors will grow, and deceptive marketing that accelerated opioid addictions through their product Duragesic (fentanyl) that rival even those of the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma.

Filled with shocking and 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.

Leseprobe
Chapter 1

An Emotional Bond

Johnson’s Baby Powder and Tylenol are among the most beloved and iconic consumer products ever sold. They largely define Johnson & Johnson’s image and have long provided the company with a protective halo of affection from consumers, professionals, and government officials.

While Tylenol is a juggernaut, Johnson’s Baby Powder is among the most potent branding instruments ever. The product’s fragrance resulted from a lengthy effort to concoct just the right bouquet. After multiple experiments, the company created a complex and distinctive floral scent with more than two hundred ingredients—natural oils, extracts, and aromatic compounds—from all over the world. The fragrance has a sweet, vanilla-like base but also contains overtones of jasmine, lilac, rose, musk, and citrus.

Company surveys found this distinctive mixture of ingredients to be the most recognized fragrance in the world, and for much of the American adult population it conjured the most pleasant memories and associations. Talc products were the cornerstone of the company’s baby products, which, despite sales that have in recent years represented less than 1 percent of the company’s revenues, were collectively the company’s “most precious asset” and “crown jewel,” according to a 2008 company slide deck titled “Our Baby History.”

“The association of the Johnson’s name with both the mother-infant bond and mother’s touch as she uses the baby products is known as Johnson & Johnson’s Golden Egg,” the 2008 slide deck stated.

Surveys showed that the Johnson & Johnson brand is associated most strongly with baby products, and that this association creates an unmatched level of trust—invaluable for a healthcare company.

“Many companies have rational trust,” a 1999 corporate slide deck stated. It listed Merck, Bristol-Myers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline, Procter & Gamble, and Colgate as among the companies with rational trust. At the time, pharmaceutical companies topped surveys of the most admired companies in the world. “Only Johnson & Johnson also has real emotional trust.”

“Johnson & Johnson’s unique trust results in real business gains for the company,” the presentation stated. Among the important benefits, the presentation claimed, is that consumers will forgive missteps and brand crises.

The most powerful of human emotional bonds is between a mother and her baby, the presentation stated. In the slides, the value of this bond is pictured as a piggy bank with coins dropping into its slot on the back, with the words “Mother-Baby Bond” on its side.

“Johnson’s baby is 50% heart and 50% mind,” concluded the slide deck, which is titled “Trust Is Our Product.”

A crucial way that Baby Powder engenders and sustains emotional trust is through its fragrance. Smells feed directly into the brain’s limbic system, the ancient seat of human emotion.

“Olfactory learning occurs before birth and helps develop social capacities,” another 2009 deck said. “Infants attach meaning to familiar smells within first hours after birth” and “Odor is important in human mother-infant bonding.”

So, for generations, much of the American population was implanted in the womb and throughout infancy with a brain worm that associates Johnson & Johnson with love, happiness, trust, and intimacy—a public relations contrivance of unrivaled power and perseverance. Those who attend graduate classes in business, communications, or medicine are still taught that Johnson & Johnson executives wrote the book on crisis response with their honesty and unselfishness in responding to an infamous Tylenol poisoning scare in 1982.

Internally, the positive associations with both products has been vital in creating and sustaining unusually strong beliefs amongst the company’s employees that J & J is uniquely ethical and an abiding force for good in the world, faith that paradoxically gives license to lapses that might not otherwise be accepted. Since the 1980s, …