Johnson and Johnson is a drug company that sells a number of medications and health related products

October 2010
Pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson may have known years ago about the deadly risks of its birth control patch Ortho Evra, according to internal documents obtained by NBC News. Patient reports between 2002 and 2004 show that Ortho Evra was 12 times more likely to cause strokes and 18 times more likely to cause blood clots than the conventional birth control pill, When Ortho Evra first hit the market in 2002, it was a big hit. As sales surged, so did claims of injury and even death.Some experts say the patch is problematic because it delivers a continuous and high level of estrogen — 60 percent more estrogen than the pill. When a birth control pill is swallowed, it quickly dissolves into the system. But with the patch, estrogen keeps flowing into the bloodstream for an entire week.

January 2010 - Federal prosecutors accuse health care giant Johnson & Johnson that it paid tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks so nursing homes would put more patients on its blockbuster schizophrenia medicine and other drugs. Prosecutors said J&J paid rebates and other forms of kickbacks to Omnicare Inc., the country's biggest dispenser of prescription drugs in nursing homes. Prosecutors allege Omnicare pharmacists then recommended that nursing home patients with signs of Alzheimer's disease be put on the powerful schizophrenia drug Risperdal, which was later found to increase risk of death in the elderly. The allegations are in a complaint filed by the U.S. Attorney in Boston, whose office has joined two whistle-blower cases. One was filed in 2003 by a former Omnicare pharmacist in Chicago, Bernard Lisitza, who alleges he was fired after he challenged the Risperdal kickbacks and other improper practices at the company. The other was filed by former Omnicare financial analyst David Kammerer in 2005, after he resigned from the company.

January 2010 - Johnson & Johnson has issued a massive recall of over-the-counter drugs including Tylenol, Motrin and St. Joseph's aspirin because of a moldy smell that has made people sick. It was the second such recall in less than a month because of the smell, which regulators said was first reported to McNeil in 2008. Federal regulators criticized the company, saying it didn't respond to the complaints quickly enough, wasn't thorough in how it handled the problem and didn't inform the Food and Drug Administration quickly. The recall includes some batches of regular and extra-strength Tylenol, children's Tylenol, eight-hour Tylenol, Tylenol arthritis, Tylenol PM, children's Motrin, Motrin IB, Benadryl Rolaids, Simply Sleep, and St. Joseph's aspirin.

August 2009 - Johnson & Johnson used a misleading medical journal advertisement to promote its Ertaczo athlete's foot cream. The ad "contains unsubstantiated efficacy claims about the product, and omits important risk information," the Food and Drug Administration said. The company is reviewing the letter and is preparing a response, said Marc Boston, a spokesman for Ortho Dermatologics, the J&J unit that sells Ertaczo.

April 2007 - Johnson & Johnson's bladder drug Ditropan needs stronger cautions about the risk of hallucination and similar problems in children and older patients.

December 2006 - A new once-a-day treatment for schizophrenia derived from the active ingredient in Johnson & Johnson blockbuster schizophrenia treatment Risperdal. The pill, called Invega, is the first new schizophrenia treatment to win U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval since 2003, according to Johnson and Johnson. Schizophrenia is a chronic, disabling mental disorder that affects more than 2 million Americans. Symptoms include hallucinations, delusions, disordered thinking, movement disorders, social withdrawal and cognitive deficits, such difficulty with perception, memory or abstract thinking. The new treatment is designed to deliver paliperidone -- the active ingredient in Risperdal -- through a technology that allows the drug to remain in the body over a longer period of time.

October 2006 - The lawsuits, filed in San Francisco Superior Court, name as defendants the drug’s manufacturer, Ortho-McNeil Pharmaceutical Co., a Titusville, N.J.-based subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson; and San Francisco-based distributor McKesson Corp. The plaintiffs seek unspecified monetary damages. Approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2001, Ortho Evra is a birth control patch that delivers the hormones estrogen and progestin directly into the bloodstream through the skin. The lawsuit claims that Ortho-McNeil failed to properly investigate the product’s safety and deceived the public about the severity of potential side effects, including strokes and severe blood clots.