The Sleep Industrial Complex: How J&J Found a Market in Your Exhaustion

America’s sleep crisis is real, documented, and profitable. Johnson & Johnson turned a public health problem into a revenue stream, and the label they chose to do it with was a calculated deception.

• The CDC reports that more than one-third of American adults do not regularly get enough sleep. Chronic sleep deprivation is linked to depression, ADHD, obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease.
• A 2023 survey of 2,005 U.S. adults by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine found that 22 percent reported using over-the-counter sleep aids. That is roughly one in five adults reaching for a product like Tylenol PM.
• The global over-the-counter sleep aid market generates nearly $65 billion annually. That number continues to rise as sleep deprivation deepens across every demographic.
• Diphenhydramine, the active sleep ingredient in Tylenol PM, was first introduced to the market in 1946 via Benadryl, at a time when medications were not required to pass rigorous safety or efficacy testing. It was initially marketed for allergy relief; users discovered its sedating effects, and the pharmaceutical industry followed the money.
• J&J and other companies repackaged this same allergy-relief antihistamine into sleep aid products. They did not develop a new, safer compound. They changed the box, the branding, and the claim on the front panel.

What Diphenhydramine Actually Does to Your Brain

Johnson & Johnson’s marketing team calls it a “sleep aid.” Neurochemists call it something else entirely. Here is the documented pharmacology they chose not to put on the label.

• Diphenhydramine is a first-generation antihistamine. Its sedating effect comes from how easily it crosses the blood-brain barrier, where it interferes with H1 receptors, causing drowsiness and sedation. It floods the brain in large quantities, not in trace amounts.
• Because the drug enters the brain so aggressively, users develop tolerance rapidly. The complaint states that tolerance can develop in as little as one to two weeks of use, meaning the recommended duration on the label is roughly the same timeframe in which the drug begins to stop working as advertised.
• Once tolerance sets in, users need larger and larger doses to achieve the same sedating effect. Users who try to stop find they cannot fall asleep without the drug. This is the definition of dependency, and it is what the label explicitly promises will not happen.
• Diphenhydramine elicits a cocaine-like pattern of stimulation of dopamine transmission in the brain. This is the same neurological mechanism that drives compulsive use of recognized addictive substances. The complaint cites this directly.
• The drug’s half-life can be as long as 18 hours. This means that even after a full night’s sleep, significant quantities of the drug remain in the user’s body the next day, producing “hangover” effects: impaired attention, reduced memory, degraded sensory-motor performance, and reduced school performance in children.
• A driving simulation study cited in the complaint found that diphenhydramine produced worse driving performance than alcohol. Tylenol PM users who drive the morning after use may be more impaired than a legally drunk driver.
• For elderly consumers, the stakes are higher still. Hospitalized elderly patients treated with diphenhydramine have an increased risk of delirium. Long-term, frequent use in adults 65 and older is associated with the development of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, due to diphenhydramine’s anticholinergic properties. The drug that J&J sells to older Americans struggling to sleep may be accelerating cognitive decline.
• Cardiac toxicity, including prolonged QTc intervals and arrhythmias, has also been documented with diphenhydramine use. A product sold as a benign, over-the-counter sleep remedy carries heart rhythm risks.
• Overdose, whether accidental or intentional, can lead to death. In adults, overdose progression moves from heavy sedation to coma. In children, an early paradoxical stimulation with agitation and confusion often precedes extreme sedation and coma.

• The abuse of diphenhydramine is so well-documented that a simple web search of “Benadryl addiction” or “diphenhydramine addiction” returns hundreds of links directing people to rehabilitation programs specifically designed for diphenhydramine dependency. This is not an obscure risk; it is a known public health problem with its own treatment infrastructure.
• The complaint cites 13 peer-reviewed studies documenting diphenhydramine dependency, misuse, abuse, and withdrawal, published between 1986 and 2021. These studies appeared in publications including the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Addiction, the Journal of Psychopharmacology, and Frontiers in Psychiatry. J&J had access to all of them.
• Both the Canadian Society of Allergy and Clinical Immunology and the Global Allergy and Asthma European Network have called for diphenhydramine to be restricted to behind-the-counter availability or subject to a prescription requirement, because the public health risks of open over-the-counter sale are considered too high. In the United States, J&J continues to sell it freely with a “Non-Habit Forming” label.

The Non-Financial Ledger: What a Habit Costs When It Has a Name

There is a kind of harm that does not show up in settlement figures or regulatory fines. It lives in medicine cabinets, in the shame of needing a pill to do something the human body is supposed to do on its own, in the moment a person realizes that the thing they bought to help them sleep is now the thing that makes sleep impossible without it.

Sirreon Goodson walked into a Walmart and a Walgreens in Sacramento in November 2023. He was looking for sleep. He found a red-and-white box with three words on the front: “Non-Habit Forming.” He is a person who cared whether the product he was putting in his body would control him. The label told him it wouldn’t. He trusted it.

He developed a habit.

That is not a clinical abstraction. That is a person who now has to reckon with the fact that a company with a 138-year history and a globally recognized name looked at what he needed, looked at what the science said their product actually does, and chose the label that would move units. Johnson & Johnson’s internal marketing research, referenced in the complaint, showed them exactly what “Non-Habit Forming” meant to consumers: safety, control, the promise of relief without loss of self. They ran the studies. They knew. They kept the three words.

The complaint makes clear that Goodson is not alone. He is the named plaintiff in a class that potentially encompasses millions of Americans. Every single one of them stood in front of a shelf, read that label, and made a decision based on a promise that was false at the time it was printed.

Consider what it means to develop a dependency on a sleep aid. You are not dependent on something that makes you feel good. You are dependent on something that lets you feel nothing, that quiets a brain that will not stop. And when the drug stops working at the original dose because your brain has adapted, you take more. When you try to stop, sleep refuses to come at all, because your brain has now built its resting state around the presence of the drug. The thing that was supposed to help you rest has become the thing standing between you and rest.

The elderly are particularly exposed. The complaint documents that long-term use of diphenhydramine in adults 65 and older is linked to dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. An older person who cannot sleep, who trusts a product explicitly marketed as safe for routine use, who takes it nightly for months or years because the label says it is not habit-forming, may be trading their cognitive future for a few hours of medicated rest. Johnson & Johnson knew this risk existed. The scientific literature on anticholinergic drugs and dementia has been building for years.

Children face a different danger. The complaint notes that paradoxical stimulation, agitation, and confusion are often the first signs of overdose in children, followed by extreme sedation and coma. A parent who gives their child a product sold over the counter with language suggesting it is gentle and safe is making a decision based on a label. They deserve an honest label.

The people who bought Tylenol PM did not fail to read the warning. The failure was in what the warning said. No asterisk. No qualifying fine print visible at the point of purchase. The complaint is explicit: there are no disclosures qualifying the “Non-Habit Forming” claim in a manner that a reasonable consumer would see before buying. What they got was a front-panel promise and a dependency they were never warned about.

The harm here is not only physical. It is the erosion of trust in the basic transaction of buying medicine. When a person cannot trust that a label means what it says, they lose something that is genuinely hard to replace: the belief that the system is designed to protect them. Johnson & Johnson did not just sell a misleading product. They spent years teaching millions of people to doubt the medicine cabinet.

Legal Receipts: What the Complaint Says, Word for Word

These are direct quotes from the federal class action complaint filed November 13, 2024 (Case 2:24-at-01432). No paraphrase. No interpretation added before you see the text. Read what they put in writing.

“Defendant named and marketed the Product with the ‘non habit-forming’ claim, but Defendant opted to formulate and manufacture them in a manner that does not conform to the representation. Specifically, the Product poses a risk of causing habitual use and is not safe because it contains diphenhydramine.”
— Complaint Para. 47(a)

“Defendant knew, or should have known, that the ‘non habit-forming’ claim would lead reasonable consumers into believing that the Product was safe and would not result in habitual use based on internal conjoint and other marketing studies. Defendant labeled and packaged the Product with the ‘non habit-forming’ claim based in part on its market research.”
— Complaint Para. 47(b)

“Diphenhydramine elicits a cocaine-like pattern of stimulation of dopamine transmission that can lead to misuse of medications containing diphenhydramine.”
— Complaint Para. 9

“Defendant deliberately chose to market the Product with the ‘non habit-forming’ claim thereby misleading consumers into buying or overpaying for the Product. Thus, Defendant knew, or should have known, at all relevant times, that the ‘non habit-forming’ claim misleads reasonable consumers, such as Plaintiff, into buying the Product to attain the Product-attributes that Defendant falsely advertised and warranted.”
— Complaint Para. 47(d)

“Tolerance can develop in as little as 1–2 weeks, requiring users to take larger and larger doses for the same sedating effect, and causing dependency in users who find they need diphenhydramine to fall asleep. The result is habitual use.”
— Complaint Para. 7

Societal Impact Mapping: Who Pays When the Label Lies

The public health consequences of the “Non-Habit Forming” misrepresentation extend well beyond one product and one plaintiff. The complaint documents harms across age groups, overdose statistics, and systemic trust in over-the-counter medicine.

• Among 92,033 overdose deaths during 2019 and 2020 tracked by the CDC, 13,574 (14.7%) were antihistamine-positive. Of those, 9,645 deaths had diphenhydramine as the primary drug involved. This is not a rounding error. It is a category of preventable death tied directly to a widely available, mislabeled consumer product.
• Diphenhydramine appeared in the CDC’s list of the ten drugs most frequently cited on overdose death certificates in 2017, alongside fentanyl, heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine. It is the only drug on that list sold openly in grocery stores with a “Non-Habit Forming” label.
• Elderly adults treated with diphenhydramine in hospital settings face increased risk of delirium. Long-term, frequent use in adults 65 and older is associated with the development of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. An aging population with chronic sleep problems, sold a product explicitly framed as safe for routine use, represents a significant and ongoing public health exposure.
• Cardiac toxicity, including prolonged QTc intervals and arrhythmias, has been documented with diphenhydramine use. A product positioned as a gentle nighttime aid carries risks that overlap with serious cardiovascular events.
• Children who overdose on diphenhydramine present with paradoxical agitation and confusion before progressing to extreme sedation and coma. The over-the-counter availability and non-habit-forming labeling creates a false safety signal for parents.
• Next-day cognitive impairment from diphenhydramine, including reduced memory, attention, and motor performance in school-aged children, represents a diffuse public health harm that is difficult to attribute to any single dose or event but accumulates across millions of users.
• Medical and regulatory bodies in Canada and Europe have called for diphenhydramine to require a prescription or at minimum behind-the-counter placement, citing exactly the public health risks documented here. The United States has taken no equivalent regulatory action.

The economic harm from J&J’s mislabeling falls heaviest on the people least equipped to absorb it: working-class consumers who pay a price premium for a safety claim that was false, and who then bear the additional costs of dependency and its treatment.

• The complaint alleges that J&J charged a price premium for Tylenol PM based on the “Non-Habit Forming” claim. Consumers paid more because they believed they were buying a safer product. That premium represents money extracted by deception from people who were specifically trying to make a responsible, health-conscious purchasing decision.
• Plaintiff Sirreon Goodson purchased the product from Walmart and Walgreens, retailers that disproportionately serve working-class and lower-income communities. The population targeted by these channels is the same population least able to absorb the costs of a dependency, including escalating product use, medical treatment, and lost productivity.
• Because tolerance develops in as little as one to two weeks, dependent consumers are compelled to purchase larger quantities over time to achieve the same effect. The mislabeling does not just create a one-time price premium; it generates a sustained revenue stream from consumers who now cannot stop buying the product.
• The 22 percent of American adults who reported using over-the-counter sleep aids are disproportionately affected by the economic conditions that drive sleep deprivation in the first place: shift work, long commutes, financial stress, and inadequate housing. These same people are then sold a product that compounds their vulnerability through an undisclosed dependency risk.
• Individual consumers lack the legal and scientific resources to challenge a corporation the size of Johnson & Johnson on their own. The class action mechanism exists precisely because J&J’s market power and legal resources make individual suits economically irrational for most plaintiffs. The structure of the harm is itself an economic inequality: the company profits from millions of small deceptions that no single consumer can afford to fight.
• J&J had exclusive control over the label. The complaint makes this explicit. Any retailer selling Tylenol PM was selling J&J’s claim. Consumers had no independent way to verify whether “Non-Habit Forming” was true, because verifying it requires specialized knowledge of diphenhydramine pharmacology that the average person does not have and should not need.

The “Cost of a Life” Metric

The complaint does not specify a final settlement or fine figure, as the case was filed November 13, 2024, and litigation is ongoing. The numbers that do exist come from the public record on the scale of both the market and the harm.

What Now: Who to Pressure, Who to Watch, and What You Can Do

The complaint was filed November 13, 2024. The label is still on the shelf. Here is who has the power to change that, and what you can do while the courts work.

Key Defendants and Corporate Decision-Makers

• Johnson & Johnson Services, Inc.: Headquartered in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The named defendant. The company that manufactured, marketed, distributed, and labeled the product. Every decision about what words appeared on that box originated here.
• J&J’s Chief Marketing Officer and Product Labeling Team [REDACTED – Not in Source]: The complaint describes internal conjoint and marketing studies used to design the label. The people who commissioned, reviewed, and acted on those studies are not named in this filing, but they exist inside the company.
• J&J’s Legal and Regulatory Affairs Leadership [REDACTED – Not in Source]: The “Non-Habit Forming” claim was on the label for at least four years with no material changes. Someone reviewed and approved that claim continuously.

Watchlist: Regulatory Bodies That Should Be Moving

• U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA): The FDA regulates over-the-counter drug labeling. The “Non-Habit Forming” claim on a diphenhydramine product is squarely within FDA’s oversight mandate. If the FDA is aware of the body of evidence cited in this complaint and has not acted, that is a regulatory failure that needs public pressure.
• Federal Trade Commission (FTC): The FTC has jurisdiction over deceptive advertising claims on consumer products. A false safety claim used to drive sales is a textbook FTC enforcement matter.
• Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB): Where the harm includes financial fraud through inflated pricing based on false claims, the CFPB has tools that may apply, particularly for lower-income consumers who paid a price premium based on a deceptive label.
• California Attorney General’s Office: The complaint invokes California’s UCL, CLRA, and FAL. The California AG has enforcement authority under all three statutes and can act on behalf of all California consumers, not just the class plaintiffs.
• State Attorneys General in Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Missouri, Florida, Massachusetts, Washington, Illinois, and New York: These are the states named in the Multi-state Consumer Protection Class. Each state’s AG has standing to investigate and act.

What You Can Actually Do Right Now

• If you have purchased Tylenol PM and developed dependency: You may be a member of the nationwide class. Contact Bursor & Fisher, P.A. (ltfisher@bursor.com or bscott@bursor.com) or Smith Krivoshey, PC (yeremey@skclassactions.com or joel@skclassactions.com), the attorneys of record on this case. Document your purchase history: dates, stores, amounts, and any health outcomes you experienced.
• File a complaint with the FDA: The FDA’s MedWatch program accepts consumer reports of adverse events from over-the-counter products. Reports of dependency, withdrawal, or other adverse effects from Tylenol PM or any diphenhydramine sleep aid directly inform the FDA’s regulatory posture. You can file at fda.gov/safety/medwatch.
• File a complaint with the FTC: The FTC accepts consumer reports of deceptive advertising at reportfraud.ftc.gov. Reporting “Non-Habit Forming” as a false advertising claim creates a paper trail that the FTC uses to identify enforcement priorities.
• Talk to your elected representatives: Members of Congress on the Senate HELP Committee (Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions) and the House Energy and Commerce Committee have oversight over the FDA. Contact their offices and ask specifically what the FDA is doing about diphenhydramine’s over-the-counter availability and labeling standards.
• Community and mutual aid: Share this information with older family members and anyone you know who uses over-the-counter sleep aids, particularly elderly relatives who may have been using diphenhydramine products for years under the assumption they were safe for long-term use. Local harm reduction organizations and community health clinics can be allies in getting accurate information to people who need it.
• Support organizations pushing for prescription reclassification: The Canadian Society of Allergy and Clinical Immunology and European allergy networks have already called for diphenhydramine to require a prescription. Advocacy organizations in the United States working on drug safety and consumer protection need public support to push for equivalent action here.