No More Tears

Johnson & Johnson spent more than a century building the most trusted name in American health care. Harris argues the trust was often misplaced. Product by product, he documents what he calls decades of deceptive marketing, concealed safety data and cash-driven relationships with doctors, along with a Food and Drug Administration too weak or too friendly to stop it.

The book began at an airport bar in 2004, when Harris, then covering pharmaceuticals for the Times, met a J&J sales rep whose story changed how he reported on the company. Earlier he covered the industry for the Wall Street Journal, where his work led to what was then the largest fine in SEC history. He won a George Polk Award for reporting on coal companies exposing miners to toxic dust.

The scope sets it apart. Talc and the asbestos question get full treatment, including litigation that produced a $2.1 billion damages award, but so do the anemia drug Procrit and evidence it could feed tumor growth, the illegal marketing of the antipsychotic Risperdal, J&J's role in opioids through the fentanyl patch Duragesic, including a chapter on opium poppies in Tasmania, the Pinnacle metal-on-metal hip, vaginal mesh and the Covid vaccine. Booklist compared it with Patrick Radden Keefe's Empire of Pain; it was a National Book Critics Circle finalist in nonfiction.

This is prosecution, not a balanced corporate history, and Publishers Weekly's enthusiastic review did not weigh the company's rebuttals. At 464 pages it is long. Analysts covering health care, litigation-exposed stocks or ESG risk will get the most from it.

1. Brand trust is a balance-sheet asset, and a liability. J&J's reputation let problems persist for years, and when they surfaced the cost came as litigation, settlements and lost goodwill.
2. Read the litigation footnotes. Talc, opioid, hip and mesh cases show how product liabilities build quietly before they show up in earnings.
3. Regulators can be captured. Harris shows an FDA that repeatedly deferred to the company, so regulatory approval is not a substitute for independent diligence.
4. Incentives drive sales practices. Payments to doctors and aggressive promotion inflated drug revenues; analysts should ask how a blockbuster actually sells.
5. Small lines can carry the brand. Baby products brought in less than 1 percent of J&J's revenue yet anchored its image, so reputational risk can sit far from where the money is made.

After an opening on J&J's history and the bond its consumer brands built with families, the book moves through the company's business lines, each a case of alleged misconduct.

1. A quintessentially American company. The founding by three brothers in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and the emotional halo of baby products, which brought in under 1 percent of revenue but defined the brand.
2. Consumer products. Johnson's Baby Powder, the talc-asbestos link and the company's efforts to keep it quiet, followed by Tylenol: its hidden dangers, the 1982 poisoning crisis that became a corporate legend, and the problems Harris finds with that story.
3. Prescription drugs. Procrit and the growth of biotech marketing through payments to doctors; the criminal campaign to sell the antipsychotic Risperdal; the Duragesic fentanyl patch and the opioid epidemic; the Ortho Evra birth-control patch.
4. Medical devices. The Pinnacle metal-on-metal hip implant and the Prolift vaginal mesh, and the FDA's weak oversight of devices.
5. Vaccination. J&J's one-shot Covid vaccine, framed as a rare shot at redemption, which by Harris's account offered weak protection.