'No More Tears' exposes a company, and industry, imperiling consumers

A PRODUCT that was assumed to be benign turns out to be dangerous.

- Gardiner Harris

A heavily marketed new drug has serious side effects. A medical device leaves a trail of complications. In all of these scenarios, the public is supposed to be protected by some combination of federal oversight, scientific and medical vigilance, and corporate responsibility.

In No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson, investigative reporter Gardiner Harris shows how those protections can fail as they relate to several products from a single, powerful company, starting with an iconic baby powder contaminated with asbestos and ending with a coronavirus vaccine that turned out to be less than efficacious.

No More Tears contains the outline of a longer, maybe multivolume treatise on the development, manufacture, testing, marketing and oversight of products that are supposed to take care of our bodies and minds - products that sometimes save us but sometimes endanger us, and prompt, always, a need to honestly weigh risks and benefits. By starting with talc and baby powder, Harris shows that even "cosmetics" can be perilous.

He then moves into prescription drugs, such as Procrit, which stimulates the bone marrow to produce red blood cells but also turned out to stimulate tumor growth in cancer patients, and to the less-regulated world of medical devices, notably a hip implant heavily marketed to orthopedic surgeons despite many reports suggesting a disturbingly high rate of the device failing and requiring new surgery.