J & J: The Bada Bing of Health Care

Punishment gluttons who read Gardiner Harris’ No More Tears will be left to decide with whom they are most furious:

• Milton Friedman and his “put shareholders first” doctrine;
• The feckless FDA for the madcap way the agency is run;
• Hypocritical doctors who misplace their oath paperwork and take bribes; or,
• Johnson & Johnson and its C-suite trough of criminal swine.

Promise, this is no easy assignment. Friedman may have single-handedly created income inequality, fracturing the middle class. The FDA – gee, thanks Congress – is funded by the interest-conflicted pharmaceutical industry. Rural doctors ditched the wholesome Moonlight Graham image by getting into cahoots with pill-pushing sales weasels. And alas, J & J leveraged public trust in its brands, and the myth built around its handling of those pesky 1982 Tylenol murders, by committing decades of unspeakable acts on a despicable mission to drive up its share price. Forced to choose, I’ll take the last one for the sheer length of the list of offenses by the company as so expertly reported on by Harris.

It didn’t have to be this way. J & J was an instrumental government supplier during World War I and the Spanish flu. Its Baby Powder was by then ubiquitous in American households, the company’s reputation unimpeachable. But in the early 1970’s, it was learned that cosmetic talc contained asbestos and there was a decent chance mothers wouldn’t want to douse their newborns – or themselves – in that sort of poison. Long now having considered itself “the baby company,” J & J chose to not alter its formula with safer corn starch and thus began its decent into complete moral bankruptcy, hiding behind trade secrets and disguising obvious evidence as to the damage it was causing. It gets worse. “Sometime in the 1980s, things took a darker turn,” writes Harris. “The company’s lawyers started hiding documents. Executives began lying under oath. Studies linking chronic talc usage with elevated cancer rates made clear that Johnson’s Baby Powder had to change, but executives instead worked to discredit the researchers.” It threw $25 billion at legal challenges over a couple decades and yet profits remained aplenty.

We’re talking cultural rot. Its handling of the Tylenol case, so widely celebrated in business schools for stellar crisis management, is a ruse with the near certainty that it was actually an inside job. J & J appeared invincible at this point with a clueless public unaware of its widespread lies. Bury studies. Find loopholes. Create wiggle room. Check, check, check. Some of the worst stories involve Risperdal, the so-called atypical antipsychotic foisted upon active boys who at an alarming rate developed breasts and demented seniors who wound up dead. And leadership knew and sometimes joked about this because, well, “every drug has risks.” Seriously. Including Notes, the book is over 400 pages long and I’m barely scratching the surface of the mountain of inside stories, in part for space but also because on a summer day you may not really want to hear about mishaps involving vaginal mesh and uterus blenders. But know this: the evidence is deep & wide that J & J was the “kingpin” behind the opioid epidemic by supplying the world’s poppies and copying Purdue’s playbook. It’s a despicable company that, thanks to Harris and his alarming book, I will now go to great lengths to avoid. Join me?

If you have anything to say about this – or book recommendations – kindly post below (rather than emailing me) to spark conversation. Thank you!