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The cover of No More Tears

No More Tears

Gardiner Harris, 2025

Follow how Johnson & Johnson's trusted image helped obscure recurring product risks, institutional influence, weak oversight, and delayed accountability across American healthcare.

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7 parts, about 27 minutes to read.

Why read it

  • Traces one pattern across nine products: a danger signal appears, the company disputes it, and regulators move slowly
  • Shows how public trust in a caring brand can become a shield against scrutiny of its drugs and devices
  • Built on internal records, trial data and court files, while carefully separating proven findings from disputed claims

Who it is for

  • Patients who want to question what their doctor prescribes
  • Clinicians curious how drug marketing reaches their prescribing
  • Health policy readers weighing how drug regulators should be funded

What the summary covers

  1. The Company Americans Learned to Trust3 min
  2. What the Powder Tests Found4 min
  3. The Tylenol Halo3 min
  4. When Prescriptions Became the Business4 min
  5. Selling Through the Warning4 min
  6. Products Cleared Without Proof5 min
  7. A Shot at Redemption, and a System That Protects the Myth4 min

Recommended by

  • Jonathan EigPulitzer Prize winning author and biographer
    A page-turning drama that raises life-or-death questions about the world's largest healthcare conglomerate.

About the author

  • Gardiner HarrisInvestigative journalist and former New York Times public health and pharmaceutical reporter
    • He was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal covering the pharmaceutical industry; his investigations there led to what was then the largest fine in the history of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
    • He was the Appalachian reporter for The Courier Journal of Louisville, Kentucky.
    • He won the Worth Bingham Prize for investigative journalism and the George Polk Award for environmental reporting after revealing that coal companies deliberately and illegally exposed miners to toxic levels of coal dust.
    • He later worked at The New York Times as a White House, South Asia, international diplomacy, public health and pharmaceutical reporter, and has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist with a team of others at the Times.
    • He left daily journalism in 2019 to write No More Tears.
    • His novel Hazard draws on his experience investigating coal mine conditions.
    • He lives in San Diego, California.

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