No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson

Gardiner Harris is an award-winning investigative journalist who has covered public health and international diplomacy for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other newspapers. At the beginning of his career, Harris worked for the Louisville Courier-Journal covering efforts in Hazard County, Kentucky, to cover up issues with air quality in coal mines and its impacts on miners’ health. In 1999, he was awarded a George Polk Award for his reporting on the mine safety scandal. Harris’s long-term concerns with institutional cover-ups of public health and safety issues are reflected in No More Tears.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is the federal agency responsible for overseeing food and product safety, including the safety of cosmetics, medications, and medical devices. In 1937, 73 people died from ingesting diethylene glycol found in a “patent medicine” called Elixir Sulfanilamide. In 1938, Congress passed the Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act which gave the FDA the power to assess the safety of drugs for approval.

Gardiner Harris is highly critical of the FDA’s inability to effectively oversee and regulate the medical industry throughout No More Tears. Harris identifies how the FDA has been compromised by close connections with the medical industry, a process known as “regulatory capture.