No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of dependency, illness, and death.

No More Years is a work of investigative journalism. Investigative journalism is a form of journalism in which reporters deeply investigate a single topic to uncover truths hidden beneath mainstream public narratives. The author, Gardiner Harris, has worked as an investigative journalist for decades. As a reliable mainstream investigative journalist, he uses archival work, internal documents, insider sources, and historical documents to reveal sometimes shocking truths about companies, government actors, and other areas of public interest.

Although Harris has long worked covering the pharmaceutical industry and public health disasters, No More Tears is a particularly timely work in the context of growing public concern over the influence of major corporations, especially medical companies, on public health policies. The most high-profile of these scandals is the ongoing opioid epidemic in the United States. Companies like Purdue Pharma and Johnson & Johnson aggressively marketed opioids for long-term pain relief despite being aware of the dangers these drugs posed to the public, namely in the form of dependency, overdose, and even death. 

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (2021) by Patrick Radden Keefe is a work of investigative journalism similar to No More Tears that focuses specifically on Purdue Pharma’s role in the crisis. Harris builds on this work by illustrating Johnson & Johnson’s role in the crisis by providing the raw ingredients for the manufacture of OxyContin to Purdue, and in producing and aggressively marketing fentanyl.

The goal of investigative journalism is to highlight failures of governance or other crises in the hope that greater public awareness will lead to reform. For instance, Upton Sinclair’s fictional The Jungle (1906), based in part on his muckraking investigative reporting about unsanitary conditions in Chicago meatpackers, led to the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. Similarly, Harris ends his exposé of Johnson & Johnson’s dangerous, unethical, and illegal activities over the decades with a call for reforms of the US healthcare system, the FDA, and other oversight bodies to ensure public safety.