Talcum Powder Lawsuit Recovers BILLIONS For Cancer Patients

Johnson & Johnson recently got hit with nearly five billion dollars by a jury for covering up the dangers of their talcum powder products. Ring of Fire’s Mike Papantonio and Farron Cousins discuss this issue.

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Johnson & Johnson recently got hit with nearly five billion dollars by a jury for covering up the dangers of their talcum powder products. A friend of mine is the one that got his verdict, Mark Lanier, wonderful lawyer. I've known Mark for a very long time. The first time he started talking to me about he was going to trial with this case, the thing that struck me is what he was doing is, he was showing why these women were getting ovarian cancer. What was it that was causing the problem?

When he ran it down, he actually found out that asbestos is contained in the talc. Where they do the mining they, by necessity, have to mine asbestos unless they have a mine where there is no asbestos. Plenty of places they could have mined, but they went to mines because they could get the cheapest deal on talc, and they'd been putting asbestos in baby powder and talcum powder for decades now.

They found it migrated, that the asbestos fiber, once it's put in the body, migrates throughout the body. As matter of fact, I handled asbestos cases early on and we proved migration then. This lawyer's a superb lawyer. His name is Mark Lanier. He's out of Houston, Texas. He actually built this theory and what it does is, it puts Johnson & Johnson in a, it is a come-to-Jesus moment.

They need to either own up, figure out how to take, compensate some of these people that have died, and get this product off the market or face bankruptcy.

You know, this one, 22 women in this particular recent suit, almost five billion dollars, which is a huge verdict.

Yeah.

Johnson & Johnson so far has lost every single case in the first round. Some of them have been overturned or reduced on appeal, but they're losing, losing, losing.

Yeah.

And those appeals are, obviously it's gonna continue to be appealed but what they're not able to overcome is that the science going back to 1971 shows that, hey, this talcum powder, even the talc that is not contaminated with asbestos-

That's true. Right.

Because those are, I mean it's two crazy things. But even just the talc itself-

Yeah.

Can embed itself, and most of these are women, that gets embedded, causes ovarian cancer.

Yeah, people, let me explain a little bit of the science, okay? The science, the cancer it causes is called a scar-based cancer. In other words, if you have a scar on your lungs, for example, this used to be what you would see with pneumoconiosis. Miners would have this. Asbestos workers would have this. But the scar itself creates abnormal cells. Those abnormal cells develop into cancer.

So what your point is, and it's a very good one. I led with the idea of the asbestos, you don't even have to have the asbestos part of this to have a case against Johnson & Johnson. You know, all I can figure, Farron, is I look at this case is, as you pointed out, they've lost every case except one. I think the first case that was tried maybe was in Wyoming or Montana. It was a long-shot case, but every case since has been 70 million, 80 million, 75 million, 400 million, five billion.

So if you are a shareholder, here's what I want to tell people if you own Johnson & Johnson stock right now. If you're a shareholder, there's something that's called a shareholder derivative case which probably has already been initiated against Johnson & Johnson, and that's where you are a shareholder and you're saying, "I'm losing, the value of my stock is dropping like a rock because you lied to us shareholders. You lied to us shareholders. Not only did you lie to the American public, you knew what was happening." As you point out, they've known about it since 1971. They thought they could cover it up.