No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of physical illness, mental illness, substance use and dependency, and death.

J&J’s growth ties in with the growth of “the final flowering of the era of the medicinal chemistry” (119) from the 1940s to the 1980s. The growth of health insurance after World War II created a larger market for prescription medicines. With the shift to prescription medicines, over-the-counter medications like Tylenol made J&J less money, and instead the company began to pursue expensive prescription medications. They had to begin to sell medications to doctors instead of consumers.

In the 1990s and 2000s, the number of new prescription medications coming to market slowed. Focus shifted to bespoke medications for rare diseases with high-dollar payments that were created using new discoveries about genetics. Further, drug companies faced competition from generic drugs by the mid-1990s.

To increase sales in a difficult market, in 1997 drug manufacturers won the right to advertise on television in the US (the only other country that permits it is New Zealand.) Further, drug manufacturers created increasingly creative and lucrative ways to “cajol[e] doctors to use medicines more often and in more patients than was prudent or strictly legal” (122).