Johnson & Johnson, say it isn’t so. I just finished listening to No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson, by investigative reporter Gardiner Harris, who takes down the corporation that has long had a reputation as one of America’s finest and most ethical companies.
Listen to this:
“Fifteen years into one of the worst public health disasters in American history and J&J was aggressively pushing a marketing plan for a new opioid with all of the same elements of that had started and accelerated the epidemic in the first place. Company executives knew exactly how deadly their actions were but they went on with them anyway because they also knew just how profitable they might be.”
“Purdue is often the primary or exclusive target in a library worth of books on the addiction epidemic for which Purdue’s oxycontin launch was the starting gun, but Andrew Kolodny, the world’s foremost expert on the opioid crisis, said that J&J was more at fault than Purdue. Of the corpses that appear in morgues across the country during the height of the prescription epidemic, the vast majority had a J&J product in their systems not a Purdue one. J&J was clearly the kingpin of the opioid epidemic, not Purdue Pharma.”
Below are two lines from my forthcoming book, The Friends and Family Guide to the Opioid Overdose Epidemic: Including How to Recognize and Treat an Overdose.
In 1982 when seven people died from cyanide contaminated Tylenol bottles that had been tampered with, Johnson and Johnson recalled 31 million bottles of the over-the-counter pain reliever. Protecting the public came before profits.
I wrote it to illustrate how in America today there are no protections, corporate or government for people who are being poisoned by fake pills produced by the drug cartels, purporting to be Percocet or Xanax or any of a number of legitimate pharmaceutical products, but actually containing lethal doses of fentanyl. I held Johnson & Johnson out as an example of corporate munificence. It turns out they were a stunning example of corporate malfeasance. And it turns out there never were any safeguards even when the pills killing people were all produced by the “legitimate” pharmaceutical companies. Big Pharma, not just Purdue Pharmaceuticals, knew they were killing Americans and they all lied about it, all in the interest of profit.
The author also levels blame at the “toothless” FDA who played the patsy over and over, easily falling for Johnson & Johnson’s repeated lies, and for the media for letting Johnson & Johnson get away with their dissembling and corruption even as it was “hiding in plain sight.”
The book doesn’t just cover the J&J role in the opioid epidemic, but it’s equally disturbing role in a variety of other medications and products (asbestos contaminated talc powder, defective hip replacements, tumor causing drugs and other products) they knew were killing or maiming people, but again and again they hid evidence and lied to protect their profits.
I agree with the Publisher’s Weekly reviewer who wrote “Harris supports his takedown with a mountain of evidence and conveys his findings in scorching prose. The result is a masterpiece of muckraking.”