Johnson & Johnson recently lost a bid to settle lawsuits that claimed its talc powder products, including baby powder, caused cancer. Author Gardiner Harris says the company's defense "is beginning to crumble." His book is No More Tears. Also, John Powers reviews the new Apple TV+ series Your Friends & Neighbors, starring Jon Hamm.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: Who is Gardiner Harris and what is his book about Johnson & Johnson?
Maybe it's that childhood memory of running into the house with a scraped knee reaching for a Band-Aid from the iconic red and white box or Tylenol from the medicine cabinet. From pharmaceuticals to medical devices, Johnson & Johnson has been woven into the most tender, vulnerable parts of our lives for generations. But a new book by investigative journalist Gartner Harris challenges that trust.
In No More Tears, The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson, Harris investigates J&J's business practices, the link to its baby powder and cancer, and the urgent questions about the safety of many of its other products.
Through court documents, accounts from whistleblowers, and those directly impacted, Harris also writes about the company's aggressive marketing tactics, which he argues helped fuel the opioid epidemic. Just last week, a court rejected Johnson & Johnson's request to approve a $9 billion settlement with tens of thousands of people suing the company over claims that its talcum powder caused cancer.
Gartner Harris is a freelance investigative journalist. He worked previously for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, where he wrote about public health and the pharmaceutical industry. Gartner Harris, welcome to the show.
Chapter 2: What are the health risks associated with Johnson & Johnson's talcum baby powder?
I'm glad to be here, Tanya. Thank you.
Well, Gardner, I really can't wait to delve into the details of this book with you. Number one, baby powder. From my memory, I remember only hearing about the dangers of talc a few years ago. So I was really shocked. To learn from your book, the dangers of talcum powder were first published in the 1920s, and then over the decades, research links to cancer grew.
But what makes your writing so astounding is that the growth in popularity of J&J baby powder, it grew as data about the dangers grew. So they were almost like alongside each other as the popularity of the use grew, so did the data showing the dangers. Can you briefly break down for me the links to cancer that were found?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
So there were research studies done in the 70s. And then moving into the 80s, there was research done that actually tied it to ovarian cancer. Talk a little bit about those studies.
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Chapter 3: How did Johnson & Johnson respond to evidence linking talc powder to cancer?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
So Johnson & Johnson just switched over to cornstarch just a few years ago. So this is not that long ago that now you can't really buy talc baby powder. But does the smell change with cornstarch?
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 –
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.
Tell us about the first case brought against J&J over its baby powder. Yeah.
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Chapter 4: What legal battles has Johnson & Johnson faced regarding their baby powder?
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,
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.
Okay. I want to parse a little bit more the legal ease here because I noticed that you have written about how there are something like 93,000 suits against J&J. But I was noticing that J&J says that they have prevailed in 16 or 17 of the ovarian cases tried in the last 11 years. Right. And they're making the distinction of the last 11 years. Is that true?
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.
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.
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
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.
Our guest today is investigative reporter Gardner Harris. We'll be right back after a break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air.
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Chapter 5: Why did the FDA's 2019 testing of baby powder matter?
Chapter 6: How has Johnson & Johnson's defense against lawsuits changed over time?
But how could a company go four decades without having to show proof their product was safe with the FDA, especially with the accusations that had been floating around all of this time? Right.
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.
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.
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.
Do you have any estimates on the number of deaths from ovarian cancer linked to J&J's baby powder?
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
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.
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.
I mean, I was even just wondering about other ovarian conditions because... I mean, every woman I know has used baby powder to keep fresh at some point. Right.
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Chapter 7: How many deaths are estimated to be linked to Johnson & Johnson’s baby powder?
In those early press releases involving the Tylenol murders, you mentioned how it was headed with McNeil Laboratories, which is a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson. Can you explain the significance of that, along with Janssen Pharmaceutical acquisitions for Johnson & Johnson? Because that kind of set them in the center of the pharmaceutical industry. It really bolstered the J&J portfolio.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
Well, I mean, yes, we now look at a bottle of Tylenol and we see that warning label that overuse can cause liver damage. But that was a long-fought battle to get those warnings, and people actually suffered.
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.
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