Gardner Harris

Johnson & Johnson put its liabilities into this small little company now called Red River and declared that company bankrupt, even though Johnson & Johnson itself, of course, is highly profitable and continues to make billions upon billions of dollars in profits.

So the extraordinary thing about the opioid story is the exclusive focus on Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers.

Certainly they were bad, and they played a major role in the opioid crisis, but they were far from alone.

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% had a Johnson & Johnson product in their system.

So this is a company that played, if not the major role in the opioid crisis, one that was equally bad with Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers.

And they did that two ways.

One way was that they—

Through this subsidiary, actually on the Tasmanian island in Australia, 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.

Johnson & Johnson supplied all of their opioid ingredients.

In addition to that, Johnson & Johnson actually is the original creator of fentanyl.

which, as you know, is a synthetic, fully synthetic opioid.

And Johnson & Johnson, in 1992, starts selling a patch, a fentanyl patch that they called Duragesic.

And it delivered fentanyl

into your system over the course of three days.

And originally the patch, when FDA approved it, was intended exclusively in the immediate aftermath of surgery, in which you might have intensive pain, or for cancer patients who were dying.

Purdue then comes along four years later, starts selling OxyContin, and demonstrates that you can make huge amounts of money

If you start selling to people with just modest and moderate pain, like back pain, and Johnson & Johnson quickly realizes, oh my, this is amazing, and pivots towards selling duragesic to this same set of patients.

And in fact...