On this day in 1972, Robert Wood Johnson, one of the founders of the pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson, created the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to ostensibly and ostentatiously promote the good health of Americans. It’s currently worth about $11 billion and dispenses a half-billion a year in grants. Once it got rolling, the Foundation quickly became the largest funder of anti-alcohol organizations, dishing out hundreds of millions of dollars to any group willing to preach a neo-prohibitionist sermon. And, of course, it was only a coincidence that at the same time, Johnson & Johnson was trying mightily to displace the self-medicinal and stress-relieving usage of alcohol with a vast spectrum of bizarro drugs with godawful side effects. They were a major contributor to the opioid crisis, and are now being sued for damages by almost every state in the Union. After their nefarious designs were revealed by this and other publications during the last decade, the Foundation now claims it is more interested in stopping child obesity and such, yet they still dole out millions a year to anti-alcohol front groups. So, is it a wild-eyed conspiracy theory to find it strange that of the largest pharmaceutical conglomerates on the planet has almost single-handedly bankrolled the neo-prohibitionist movement for half a century? You tell me.
