The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson’s Deadly, Illegal Activities

I imagine myself facing a skill-testing question, on a topic I know a lot about, prescription drugs: Which American pharmaceutical company holds the record for the most criminal and civil penalties related to illegal marketing and fraud?

I guess, hmm, maybe Pfizer? I say that because I remember a US judge once called Pfizer a “recidivist” organization that routinely breaks the law, pays fines, and then goes out to break the law some more.

Pfizer’s $2.3 billion fine (the largest health-care fraud settlement in history) for marketing drugs for off-label purposes, is only slightly more than Johnson & Johnson’s settlement of $2.2  billion for illegal marketing of Risperdal and related drugs.

However, the overall winner of the highest volume of criminal or civil penalties for deceptive marketing, kickbacks, fraud against public health programs, and ripping off Medicare/Medicaid, goes to that American of all companies, Johnson & Johnson.

J&J has paid an estimated $8.5 billion in marketing-related penalties across multiple cases, tied to illegal promotions, fraud, deceptive marketing and Pfizer is a distant second at $3.4 billion.

It helps to remember those fines are only paid after they get caught, mostly in cases that have woven their way through an obstacle course of delay, obfuscation, negotiation, secret settlements, and sometimes excruciating waits by patients and families hoping for some recognition and compensation for the death or injuries experienced by their loved ones.

Why is this relevant? Because the second biggest thing drug companies should be known for, after developing and marketing blockbuster drugs, is crime: committing it, trying to avoid punishment, and then only when forced to, paying for it. Those massive legal costs, of course, are ultimately paid by you, the pill-consuming public.

Johnson & Johnson’s famous and well-respected reputation, built on iconic blockbuster brands such as Tylenol, Band-Aids, Baby Powder, and Baby Shampoo comes under direct fire in Gardiner Harris’s excellent book No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson (which is our Book of the Week, see the profile on it below…).

In it he points out how all major pharmaceutical companies spend substantial amounts of money to defend themselves against litigation, partly because their constant and inventive levels of lawbreaking are an essential part of their business model. Between 2010 and 2021 J&J spent $25 billion on litigation, a number that is likely higher than that any other company in the Fortune 500.

A company this big and this powerful eventually skews how law is actually practiced in the US, and helps explain why so many drug companies find it more rewarding for their shareholders to break the law than to follow it.

Harris’s point is crystal clear: both the legal and the drug regulatory systems in the US are in need of deep reform and he doesn’t mince words when he writes: “For all intents and purposes, Johnson & Johnson is a criminal enterprise…And if one of the most admired corporations in the world is in reality a criminal enterprise and a killing machine, what else are we missing? How many other killers are out there?”

The “dark secrets” of Johnson & Johnson are a litany of jaw-dropping misdeeds: willfully marketing asbestos-laced baby powder, glossing over the well-studied dangers of the most swallowed drug in human history (Tylenol—also known as acetaminophen or paracetamol), egregiously marketing the antipsychotic drug Risperdal (risperidone) to demented people (despite warnings that it would increase death rates in those people) and children (causing boys to grow breasts and lactate).

On top of this, their marketing of the opioid Duragesic (fentanyl transdermal patch) and their outsized role in the opioid epidemic across much of North America means that many of the unnecessary thousands of overdose deaths could be laid at their feet.

In case after case of J&J’s checkered history, replete with criminality and disturbing abuses of authority, law and human ethics, profit comes first. If vulnerable patients suffer and die, that’s simply the cost of doing business.

Harris’s prescriptions for reform as he concludes No More Tears have been heard many times and are worth repeating. The FDA must eliminate the dark money from drug regulation, and start treating the American Public as its client, not the drug companies.

It should crack down on prohibiting physicians from taking money or gifts from pharmaceutical companies while treating patients, banning continuing medical education funded by drug companies, and switching to a system where the US taxpayers (and not the drug companies) pay the bill for regulating and approving drugs.

His final critique is hardly radical: Until we stop allowing dirty money to write the rules of drug approval, marketing, and prescribing, our system will only continue to encourage big pharmaceutical companies, like Johnson & Johnson to kill, pay fines, and go forth to kill again.

We would like to thank Alan Cassels and the Brownstone Institute for this article. You can read the original full-length article on the Brownstone Institute’s website at: https://brownstone.org/articles/book-review-of-no-more-tears-the-dark-secrets-of-johnson-johnson/

We would also refer you to the reprint in The Defender, the Children’s Health Defence newsletter at: https://childrenshealthdefense.org/community/dark-secrets-new-book-gardiner-harris-johnson-johnsons-deadly-illegal-activities