Thread by @GardinerHarris

1. Twenty years ago, I sat at an airport bar and met a Johnson & Johnson sales rep whose wrenching story led me to do stories that changed federal law and finally to write “No More Tears,” a book about J&J that goes on sale April 8. Pre-order here: . rb.gy/9r0119

2. I covered J&J for both the WSJ and NYT and knew a deeper dive was needed. So I spent 5 years documenting J&J’s many crimes – by far history’s largest and most ruinous conspiracies that together cost more than 2 million American lives and counting.

3. J&J’s American body count far exceeds the combined toll from every American war and military skirmish. Its top executives are responsible for more death and injury than Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad or any other living figure.

4. Yet J&J consistently ranks among the most admired corporations in the world, and its management is applauded at business and communications schools, think tanks and universities. No company has ever had a wider gap between image and reality.

5. To keep sales of one pill rising after the FDA warned that it could kill, J&J executives quietly reassured doctors that they would never face legal consequences for killing their patients and then bribed them to keep prescribing it, according to grand jury testimony.

6. Another medicine became the most widely used drug in cancer because J&J hid evidence that it made tumors grow. Hundreds of thousands died, an ongoing toll made worse by billions in insurance fraud by oncologists and hospitals that J&J helped conceive.

7. Decades of lies hid these truths, which are revealed in the book through files from three secret grand juries, hundreds of interviews with J&J executives, thousands of internal company documents and tens of thousands of pages of trial transcripts.

8. J&J ducked real accountability for its many crimes by corrupting the nation’s watchdogs. In 2012, J&J secretly saved the jobs of hundreds of FDA employees, and the FDA responded by safeguarding the company from legal peril again and again.

9. Prosecutors decided against charging J&J executives and then left for jobs at law firms hired by J&J. Doctors who knew the company’s shocking toll kept quiet because J&J bribed them. Generous donations and army of lobbyists kept Congress and presidents in line.

10. Elite media turned a blind eye because J&J is among the largest buyers of advertising in the world. I covered J&J for the WSJ and NYT, and the book offers inside accounts about why both publications failed to uncover the world’s most prolific serial killer.

11. Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers are widely seen as the apotheosis of corporate greed, and the opioid crisis is widely portrayed as both uniquely bad and the worst drug crisis ever. These notions are all wrong, but such myths are peddled to hide more appalling truths.

12. That one of the largest and most admired conglomerates secretly victimized millions reveals the system’s corruption and injustice as little Purdue never could. J&J’s story is the quintessential American saga, and this book reveals the real America.