Gardiner Harris
Appearances
Apple News Today
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This is a company that played, if not the major role in the opioid crisis, one that was equally bad with Purdue Pharma.
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How tariffs could transform the auto industry
In fact, during the height of the prescription opioid crisis, about 10 to 20 percent of the bodies that showed up in morgues had a Purdue Pharma product in their system. Roughly 60 percent had a Johnson & Johnson product in their system.
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They produced most of the natural opioid ingredients used for all opioids in the United States, including Purdue Pharma's OxyContin. OxyContin could never have become as popular or been as widely used without Purdue's partnership with Johnson & Johnson.
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It's hard to even conceive of this now, that anyone could possibly claim that fentanyl is non-addictive. But that's what Johnson & Johnson did for years and years and years. So, of course, death soared.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
But this woman then deposed her father. And her father came in and said that these companies had been lying for decades, that there had been tests done. showing that there was asbestos in these talcs and that the companies had been hiding these documents and lying about it ever since. And that deposition then led to a whole series of events in which these documents were finally unearthed.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
And once those documents were unearthed, another lawyer named Mark Lanier sued Johnson & Johnson on behalf of 22 women. The case was heard in a St. Louis courtroom. And in 2018, a jury returned an astounding verdict. It found Johnson & Johnson liable for $4.2 billion. billion. Now, on appeal, judges reduced that amount to $2.1 billion. But then Johnson & Johnson appealed that.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
And during the appeal, interest accumulates on that judgment. And so by the time all of the appeals were exhausted, the total amount had risen from $2.1 billion to $2.5 billion. And in fact,
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
Interest was accumulating at that point to the tune of $400,000 a day, which was why Johnson & Johnson, when the appeals were exhausted, sent the money to the attorney the very next day because, of course, the interest was accruing at such a shockingly high rate.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
So that is true. They mostly prevail in court. Now, the problem for Johnson & Johnson is that their defense is beginning to crumble. And the biggest blow to them was in 2019. The FDA, which had been sitting on the sidelines of this dispute for 50 years, decided to do its own test of Johnson's baby powder. And not surprisingly, the FDA found that it was contaminated with asbestos.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
But Johnson & Johnson came out with a statement saying that the FDA was wrong. It had gotten its test wrong and that Johnson's baby powder does not have asbestos in it. Nonetheless, the very next year, Johnson & Johnson withdrew talc-based baby powder from the American and Canadian markets. And then two years later, withdrew it from the rest of the world.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
Subsequently, more and more and more research has shown that talc cannot be certified as free of asbestos ever because asbestos will always be present in small amounts. So as that research has built up, Johnson & Johnson's defense has gotten more and more difficult, which is why Johnson & Johnson has been trying to
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
to put this whole thing into bankruptcy court, which has frozen nearly all baby powder lawsuits since 2021, when Johnson & Johnson filed its first bankruptcy claim.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
So the cosmetics office at the FDA is actually part of the food office. And the food office has been chronically underfunded for decades. The cosmetic office has almost no funding. So the cosmetic office tries to kind of set standards for the industry about the safety of cosmetics. which is what Johnson's baby powder is. It's designated a cosmetic.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
So those standards are essentially that companies have to test these things themselves and report back to the FDA if any of those test results are concerning. Johnson & Johnson had hundreds of test results that were concerning, that showed the presence of asbestos. But the company didn't report a single one of them back to the FDA.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
And the FDA never really asked for them because, again, that cosmetic office is so massively underfunded, they simply couldn't do anything about it.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
So the president of the American Epidemiological Society did do an estimate as part of this litigation. And at the time, she estimated from a sort of a fairly narrow range of years, around 85,000 women had died from ovarian cancer exclusively because of their use of Johnson's baby powder. There have been many more years of
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
And so she basically said roughly 15 percent of the women in the United States who die of ovarian cancer probably got their disease because of Johnson's baby powder. There are roughly 20,000 women every year who get ovarian cancer. As you know, it's an unusually deadly illness because there is no screening for ovarian cancer.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
Usually when a woman finds out about it, she's already third or fourth stage. It's very advanced. My own sister died last year of ovarian cancer. She didn't know that she was sick. So ovarian cancer has a roughly 50% mortality within five years because so many women just don't know they're sick until it's too late.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
So the funny thing about and sort of the sad thing about Johnson's baby powder and the use of talc for thousands of years is that it's linked with sort of two unfortunate things. Right. One is racism. The other misogyny. Racism because talc has for thousands of years been a basic skin whitener. In places like India, where I lived for many years, skin whiteners are by far the most popular cosmetic.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
And the other thing that talc and Johnson's baby powder in particular was used for was was by women who were concerned about normal vaginal smells. They used this powder in their underwear to cover up those smells, even though, as we know, there is nothing wrong with normal vaginal smells. That's why they would use it every morning.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
So there were case after case after case where journalists tackled this story, got labs to test Johnson's baby powder, found that those tests showed the presence of asbestos. They then would contact the company. The company would call the headquarters of those newspaper and TV journalists and say, if you run this story, we will withdraw all of our ads.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
Now, Johnson & Johnson was not only one of the largest pharmaceutical companies, but It was also one of the largest medical device companies, and it had among the largest slate of consumer healthcare products like Aveeno, Tylenol, St. Joseph's Aspirin, countless other products that we all count on on a day-to-day basis. So it is one of the largest advertisers in the world.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
If you watch the evening news for it, for example, you will see – Ad after ad after ad of prescription medicines. Johnson & Johnson is a huge player in that space. And if you tackle this company, you do so at the risk of the very funds that are used to fund journalism.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
Sure. There had been multiple prior smaller tampering episodes for years. One of the reasons why Johnson & Johnson could pivot so quickly to having bottles manufactured with all three seals is that the company had been considering a step like this for many years because of the prior contamination episodes.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
So every FDA commissioner of the modern era has gone to work for pharmaceutical companies after they left government service. Some of them worked for pharma companies before government service. Arthur Hayes Jr., who was the commissioner during the 1982 Tylenol scare, quickly, almost instantly retired. forgave Johnson & Johnson any role in the crisis.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
He almost immediately announced that there was no way that Johnson & Johnson could have known about the poisoning or could have been involved with it, despite the fact that there had been, as we talked about, these prior poisoning episodes.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
In the 1950s, top executives at Johnson & Johnson decided that the company should really get into the pharmaceutical industry. At the time, drugs were known as the ethical pharmaceutical industry. But there were... any number of schlock cures that were widely sold.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
And the head of Johnson & Johnson at the time, a truly ethical man, Robert W. Johnson II, didn't want to get into the industry because of its reputation for schlock cures. But he was finally persuaded to buy two companies, one, McNeil Laboratories, a family-owned drug maker based
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
based in Philadelphia, whose biggest drug at the time was Tylenol, which at the time was available only by prescription. And he bought a Belgium-based drug maker named Janssen Pharmaceutical, which was basically a drug discovery lab owned by Paul Janssen, one of the great drug discoverers in history. Those two purchases were spectacularly successful.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
So talc and asbestos have the identical chemical constituents. And it's just a question of time and pressure about whether those chemicals grow into talc on the one hand or asbestos on the other. And in fact, they're so similar that all deposits of talc have at least a little bit of asbestos in it. And all deposits of asbestos have at least a little bit of talc in it.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
Soon after the purchase, McNeil Laboratories got approval from the FDA to sell Tylenol over-the-counter. And Paul Janssen discovered a whole wealth of drugs. One of the drugs he discovered, by the way, was fentanyl. Another drug he discovered was Haldol, one of the most popular antipsychotics ever sold. So quickly, pharmaceuticals became the biggest moneymaker for Johnson & Johnson.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
And of course, Tylenol going over the counter turned out to be a bonanza. And one of the most important things for Tylenol was in 1976, the FDA approved over-the-counter sales of extra strength Tylenol. Now, this is acetaminophen at 500 milligram doses, which is a very high dose. And in fact...
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
Tylenol extra strength to this day is the only over-the-counter medicine where the recommended dose is the same as the maximum dose. If you go over the recommended dose, you very much risk liver failure.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
Sure. For decades, the FDA... at Johnson & Johnson's behest, refused to require any kind of warnings or any kind of real warnings on bottles of Tylenol, which was why Tylenol has long been the most dangerous over-the-counter medicine, and it's not even close. Deaths from all other over-the-counter medicines combined don't add up to the deaths from Tylenol.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
And that's because not only is extra strength Tylenol, the recommended dose is the maximum dose, but in some people, and you don't know if this is you, they have a special sensitivity to the medicine in Tylenol, which is known as acetaminophen. People who drink the standard amount of alcohol, which is a couple of drinks a day, have a particular susceptibility to acetaminophen.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
And I'm not talking about drinking while taking acetaminophen. I'm just talking if you drink in your life, you have an extra sensitivity to acetaminophen. So FDA would consult Dr. expert advisory committees again and again and again about what to do. And again and again, these advisory committees told the FDA, you have to strengthen the warning on Tylenol.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
One that was personally very important to me was Mary Pazder. I knew Mary for years because she was married to Rick Pazder, who's the top cancer official at the FDA. Mary herself was an oncology nurse who worked at the National Institutes for Health, which I also covered. And she was delightful. She had these two yappy dogs that were terribly actually behaved.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
And one of them bit me badly when I visited the Pazders at their apartment one day. But Mary got ovarian cancer and I was with her as she fought this illness. And in fact, she asked the FDA to approve an experimental use of a particular cancer compound to treat her cancer. And it was her husband, Rick Pazder, who approved that experimental use. But she eventually succumbed to the illness and died.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
When it came out a few years later that FDA found asbestos in Johnson's baby powder, Rick Pazder, her surviving husband, filed suit against Johnson & Johnson, something almost no one knows. Because Rick Pazder is arguably the most influential oncologist on the planet. He has seen more secret data about cancer drugs than any person alive.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
He believes that Johnson's baby powder killed his wife because, as he says... Mary Pazder used Johnson's baby powder every morning when she got out of the shower. In fact, he tells this story about he always wore black socks to the office.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
And if he ever went into the bathroom after Mary was there, his black socks would turn white because of the amount of Johnson's baby powder that she would sprinkle on herself and that would get on the floor of the bathroom.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
You cannot fully separate the two. And Johnson & Johnson became aware of the presence of asbestos in its talc-based baby powder products. Roughly in the 1940s and 50s, the first documents that are part of the collection of documents that I now include on a website started in the 1950s. And the reason that time frame is...
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
His lawsuit is one of 93,000 that were frozen by the many bankruptcy filings that Johnson & Johnson has filed. It will now advance because, as you said at the beginning, that last bankruptcy filing was thrown out by a federal judge just last week. So Rick is waiting for his day in court.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
is important is that it was around the 1950s that scientists became aware that asbestos was uniquely dangerous amongst minerals, that even tiny microscopic amounts of asbestos exposure could lead to cancer, most prominently mesothelioma, which is a cancer of the lining of the lung. So In the 1950s and the 1960s, Johnson & Johnson executives start expressing concern internally.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
Oh, no, this is our iconic product. It has asbestos in it, clearly, and there are starting to be concerns about it. But in the early years, you can kind of understand executives pushing off those concerns because in the 1960s, Asbestos was everywhere in American society. There was not a car, plane, truck or boat that didn't have asbestos in it.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
So the small amounts of asbestos in Johnson's baby powder seemed in those early years as if it wasn't a terrible concern. That would change in the 1970s.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
So the research began building up in the 60s and 70s that asbestos was this uniquely dangerous mineral that, again, tiny amounts of it could cause cancer. And then in 1982, a Harvard epidemiologist Thank you so much for having me.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
was that those women who had used talc-based baby powder, and Johnson & Johnson was by far the most popular, had a significantly increased risk of ovarian cancer versus those women who had not used Johnson's baby powder and other talc-based powders.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
Sure. So that's the thing about asbestos is the mystery of how it causes cancer continues to this day. Asbestos' particles are so tiny that they actually spear DNA, and that spearing leads to genetic changes that then lead to cancer.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
But one person can breathe asbestos in large quantities for years, and another person can just be exposed to it for a moment, and that latter person might get cancer, whereas the former person doesn't. But the latency period for asbestos-related cancers, meaning the delay between the exposure in the first instance and the cancer in the other, can be decades.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
In fact, as much as 40 years can pass between the time you're exposed to asbestos and when you get the disease. And that sets up not only a terrible problem for women who have used this, It also obviously sets up a problem for their babies. About half of American infants during the 20th century had their bottoms dusted with Johnson's baby powder because it was that popular.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
And so these babies breathed in tiny amounts of asbestos daily. During their infancy, and of course the mothers did as well, as you know, tiny infants can have diaper changes as many as 12 and even 18 times a day. And talc is so finely ground that the powder from talc can remain suspended in an air for more than an hour, an hour and a half.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
So if you're doing a dozen diaper changes over the course of a day, basically you're going to have talc particles and asbestos particles in your changing room's air almost all day.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
It's basically impossible or close to impossible to link a specific case of ovarian cancer with use of Johnson's baby powder decades before. So what lawyers have basically done is show juries the proof, the evidence that asbestos has been in baby powder for all this time and then show juries that
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
the evidence that their clients had used Johnson's baby powder extensively for years, if not decades, and then asked the juries to kind of make the link. And in some very prominent cases, the juries have been incredibly angry at what Johnson & Johnson did, which is, as the evidence of talc's deadly effects started to build.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
So that first 1982 epidemiological study was followed by many, many, many more linking talc use on the one hand with cancer on the other hand. And what Johnson & Johnson did was attack the science, attack the scientists, and and deny throughout this period of time that they had ever seen evidence that asbestos was in their baby powder.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
So other companies, Pfizer among them, Colgate, many other companies used talc powder in their products, in their powders. And nearly all of those other companies started ending their use of talc because of these problems. and because of the growing literature linking talc use to cancer. Johnson & Johnson didn't do that.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
Part of the reason was that Johnson & Johnson dominated the space much more than other companies. Another was that Johnson's baby powder was so thoroughly linked with the company and its history. And in fact, the great executive for Johnson & Johnson was Robert Wood Johnson II.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
And he thought Johnson's baby powder was the company's most important and most valuable product in part, Tanya, because of that extraordinary emotional connection. As you know, smells are the one sense that is most linked with memory. When you smell something that reminds you of your grandparents' home, for instance— you suddenly are filled with these emotional memories of your grandparents.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
And that's because your smell center is linked most closely with the emotional center in your brain. And so the two of them combine to create an enormous sense of trust when you become attached to a particular smell. So for decades, Johnson & Johnson executives would start many of their speeches by saying, when I say Johnson's baby powder, how many of you can just smell it?
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
And the entire room would light up. That's why the company sort of stubbornly stuck to this product long after the health risks associated with it became very clear and long after nearly every other company abandoned talc.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
It doesn't. So the stubbornness in some ways is sort of hard to understand. But Here's the thing. Johnson & Johnson in many ways is a law firm with a drug and a medical device subsidiary attached. And the company from very early on has taken a kind of no prisoner stance to litigation and to claims against it. It does not settle unless it is absolutely forced to settle. So –
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
transitioning from talc-based baby powder to one based upon cornstarch would have seemed to the company as if they were giving in. And that's just not something Johnson & Johnson does.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
So the first case was filed in 2011, 2012 by a lawyer named Alan Smith. He brought it in North Dakota. And his claim basically, he did not have all of these documents that we now have showing that Johnson's baby powder was filled with asbestos and that the company knew about this for the first since at least the 1950s.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
He didn't know about those documents because Johnson & Johnson's lawyers refused to provide them. These documents had been requested and Johnson & Johnson's lawyers for decades had defied court orders and simply didn't provide those documents. And so Alan Smith sued. The jury in North Dakota actually found in his favor but didn't award any money to his client.
Fresh Air
The Dark Secrets Of Johnson & Johnson
Meanwhile, a woman got mesothelioma and she filed suit against a company that was linked with Johnson & Johnson claiming that her mesothelioma had happened because she used to do her homework in her father's office who tested talc products. Now, the company, again, like it had been doing for 25 years, responded that there was never any documents showing that its talc ever had asbestos in it.