Former New York Times and Wall Street Journal reporter Gardiner Harris is out with a new book – No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson (Random House, 2025) – an expose of Johnson & Johnson, the world’s largest healthcare conglomerate, and the human toll of its corporate misdeeds.
Harris asks – “What if one of the world’s most admired corporations is also its deadliest criminal enterprise?”
Johnson & Johnson prides itself on providing comfort for every stage of life: baby shampoo promising no tears, relief from a common headache, or even a vaccination that protects us against a deadly virus.
But Harris lays out in detail how this company, trusted by millions, has actually engaged in decades of deceitful and dangerous corporate practices, making us sicker in the process.
While the disasters involving Johnson & Johnson’s asbestos-laced Baby Powder and Tylenol poisoning scandal have been well-documented, No More Tears lays bare the full scope of the corporate wrongdoing, from the destructive misuse of Risperdal to faulty birth control and toxic hip implants.
Featuring secret grand jury testimony and extensive interviews, Harris’s investigations reveal that Johnson & Johnson’s products have contributed to the nation’s enduring drug crises, ultimately leading to the deaths of as many as two million people and counting.
To keep sales of its antipsychotic drug Risperdal rising even after the FDA warned that the drug could kill elderly dementia patients, Johnson & Johnson sales reps reassured doctors that they could escape legal culpability for prescribing a drug that offered no benefits for dementia patients and could potentially kill them. That’s according to secret grand jury testimony obtained by Harris.
Would you agree that the Risperdal case, where there was a criminal prosecution, is one of the most egregious cases in your book?
“I do think Risperdal is the most egregious case in the book,” Harris told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last week. “More than a million Americans have died from Risperdal and its sister atypical antipsychotics. The opioid crisis is routinely referred to as the worst public health crisis in American history. It is not.”
“It is the atypical antipsychotic crisis that continues to this day.”
How many deaths were there from the opioid epidemic?
“The initial opioid epidemic was the prescription opioid epidemic. That is an iatrogenic epidemic – a doctor-caused epidemic. The death toll of that epidemic is usually put at half a million deaths. That’s the prescription opioid epidemic.”
“To this day, something like 20,000 people die every year in the United States because of prescription opioids. But 60,000 people die every year as a result of Risperdal and other atypical antipsychotics because of their overuse and widespread use in nursing homes in this country.”
“A top FDA official likened this crisis to mass euthanasia with plausible deniability,” Harris said.
“And the reason the death toll got so high is that Johnson & Johnson created this marketing program to teach doctors, particularly psychiatrists, to use Risperdal in patients with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, even though Johnson & Johnson knew that Risperdal does nothing to help these patients and it often kills them, and it kills them in two ways.”
“It makes them much more likely to have a heart attack and stroke – those are known as thromboembolic events. And then it makes it much more likely for them to get respiratory infections that can kill them.”
“Remember that COVID 19 really struck nursing homes hard in the United States in its first month. And in fact, American nursing homes had a much higher death toll than nursing homes in other parts of the world.”
“American nursing homes also happen to use Risperdal and similar antipsychotics much more than nursing homes in other parts of the world. Risperdal makes you far more susceptible to respiratory infection. COVID 19 is a respiratory infection.”
What share of that first wave of deaths in the United States from COVID 19 that led to such panic in the United States was actually due to Risperdal?
“No one knows. That was a study that I begged certain researchers to do. They universally refused. And this is an aspect of the Johnson & Johnson story. This is a company with enormous resources. It spends more on lawyers than any other company in the United States. Since 2011, Johnson & Johnson has spent $35 billion on lawyers and litigation expenses, which is an order of magnitude more than the second biggest spender in the United States.”
“It also has consultants in almost every major academic medical center in the country. There is the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which is the second largest healthcare focused foundation in the world after the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. People are afraid of taking on Johnson & Johnson because they might get sued or because they might lose grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.”
“Part of the problem that I faced in doing this book is while I had been a top healthcare reporter at the New York Times for many years, and I knew a lot of the top academics across the country, very few of them were willing, at least on the record, to go after Johnson & Johnson.”
“And in fact, when this book neared the finish line, we sent it out to get blurbs. And I made the mistake of sending my book to many of the top healthcare authors in the country. These are people you know and are widely read. Not a single one of them would agree to blurb this book. They have their reasons. But let’s just say, courage is not widely held in this space.”
How many people have died as a result?
“More than a million people.”
How could it be that that is happening and most Americans don’t know about it while they do know about the opioid epidemic?
“While the body count in antipsychotics is probably at least twice as large as the body count for opioids, the people who die from this are elderly, they are nearing death. The people who are prescribed this drug usually have dementia or Alzheimer’s. In some cases, the family sees their deaths as a blessing.”
“There is an aspect of these deaths that is a form of euthanasia. The problem is that many families don’t actually realize that the atypical antipsychotic being prescribed to their loved one is likely to kill them. These drugs are widely used as chemical straight jackets to make nursing homes quieter at night.”
“People who have Alzheimer’s or have dementia when left untreated often do wake up at night, confused and seeking care. If they are treated with Risperdal, they don’t wake up at night. There is very clear evidence that when staffing costs rise, the use of antipsychotics go up. There are some nursing homes in this country where every single patient in the nursing home is prescribed antipsychotics. And those nursing homes use these drugs to reduce their staffing costs. They hire fewer people on the night shift. They can be confident that everyone is going to be asleep because they have been given these major tranquilizers before going to bed.”
“It’s a quiet crisis that in some cases can be a blessing for families.”
Back in 2013, the company was criminally prosecuted for these crimes. The judge in the case said this: “The defendant marketed a drug approved for schizophrenia to elderly patients with dementia and mentally disabled children, which were not approved uses,” he said. “It did so despite its clear and unequivocal study showing the drug increased the risk of stroke and fatality among elderly patients suffering dementia. It did so in a calculated manner. It was not coincidental nor accidental. It was intended to maximize profit without regard to risk.”
No corporate executives were prosecuted. No doctors were prosecuted even though doctors were bribed to give the drug.
“I do have many of the grand jury files related to three different investigations. And those files show that Johnson & Johnson’s behavior was criminal. They sold this drug, as Judge Savage said, knowing that it would kill these patients.”
“I thought the details from the grand jury testimony were remarkable. They were required by the FDA to put one of the most extraordinary warnings on any widely sold drug that the FDA has ever required. The warning on Risperdal says – this is not approved for use in dementia, which basically says there’s no benefit to it. And the warning says – it could cause death.”
“It was an extraordinary warning. How does Johnson & Johnson respond? It responded, according to these grand jury files and grand jury testimony, by having its sales reps tell doctors – don’t worry, you can continue to kill your patients, because no one will know that patients who died of heart attacks died as a result of these drugs, as opposed to simply a natural heart attack. And it told these psychiatrists, if you’re worried about it, you should start diagnosing your dementia patients as having late onset schizophrenia, not dementia, but late onset schizophrenia.”
“There is no such thing as late onset schizophrenia. But that diagnosis soared, and to this day, one in nine nursing home patients in this country is diagnosed with late onset schizophrenia. It is an appalling, outrageous situation. These diagnoses are obviously fraudulent. They are intended to cover a deadly use of this drug, and it continues to this day.”
Do you think that the people who run the nursing homes know that this is euthanasia with plausible deniability, as the FDA official told you?
“Everyone knows in nursing homes the true effect of these drugs. But everyone also knows in nursing homes that these drugs save you money and problems in your facility. The point of the drugs, as a top Eli Lilly official admitted in sworn testimony before their grand jury, is to make things better for the nursing home facilities, not to make things better for patients.”
“Prescriptions of any medicine to a patient can only be made for the sake of that patient, not for anyone else’s sake. This problem is widespread. It continues, and efforts to crack down on it, and there have been a few over the years, have largely been unsuccessful.”
[For the complete Interview with Gardiner Harris, see 39 Corporate Crime Reporter 22( 12), May 26, 2025, print edition only.]