No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson

Gardiner Harris is a career investigative reporter who has covered public health, corporate malfeasance, regulatory capture, and attempted cover-ups since the 1990s. In the Introduction to No More Tears, Harris uses traditional journalistic techniques to preface his critique of the medical conglomerate Johnson & Johnson. First, he opens his account with a personal anecdote to emphasize the human drama and intrigue in what could otherwise be a dry account of medical malpractice and The Lack of Corporate Ethics and Accountability. It effectively introduces Harris as a character within this narrative. For instance, one gets a sense of Harris’s history and personal sense of humor when he writes, “I’d spent most of the 1990s in Kentucky and knew enough rapid college basketball fans to know I should keep my trap shut while the game was on” (xi). 

Harris establishes the stakes of Johnson & Johnson’s “shady” practices by describing how the J&J drug rep’s own family was negatively impacted by her own role in “pushing” Risperdal’s use in children. This opening anecdote also attempts to create intrigue when it concludes, “I never saw or heard from [the drug rep] again” (xiv). This gives a sense of the dangers that whistleblowers and other staff at J&J face in coming forward with their concerns about the company’s practices, as well as the difficulty of getting people with knowledge to talk to a reporter.

Harris makes it seem as if this chance encounter with a J&J drug rep in Chicago was what drove him to investigate J&J. However, this is something of an artificial framing for the sake of the narrative. He notes later that he had become aware of J&J’s secrecy by 1999. Further, the company was solidly within his reporting beat of the pharmaceutical industry. Even so, this slight artifice does not detract from the overall reliability of his reporting as a seasoned journalist who provides extensive endnotes to justify his claims.

Traditional journalists like Gardiner Harris do not typically foreground their personal connections to their reporting as they often wish to appear objective, rather than subjective, in their work. In No More Tears, however, Harris takes a much more argumentative tone than would be found in his newspaper reporting. To preface this more subjective approach in the Introduction, he includes his personal connection to J&J, noting that in Princeton, New Jersey, where he spent his teens, the company was a core part of the fabric of the community.