The Dark Story of Johnson & Johnson and Asbestos

J&J baby powder, We find out now that it has asbestos in it. Ring of Fire’s Mike Papantonio and Peter Mougey discuss this issue.

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Real quick, J&J baby powder, they're in trial right now up in New Jersey on this case.

Right.

We find out now that it has asbestos in it. You had all these women that were dying from cervical cancer. Well, the asbestos inside is a tremolite asbestos, a very, very potent kind of asbestos. That asbestos has the ability, once it gets into your body, it migrates all through the body. They even find asbestos fibers in the brain, all the way down in the leg. Now you have these asbestos fibers migrating through the body, women of course were putting it all over the body, it was moving up into the cervix and now these women are dying of cervical cancer. What's your take on this case?

You used to do these cases, I think. The meso cases.

Yeah I handled a lot of the asbestos cases. Mesothelioma, yeah.

That's right. And you can only get meso from asbestos.

Only asbestos. Yeah, that's correct.

You have people that have used J&J for their baby powder and all of a sudden have meso. What I thought was disgusting, so you have this expert that came on the stand this week and said, "Oh yeah, there's asbestos in J&J baby powder." During the case, they're blaming it on the defendants or blaming it on well, you might've been exposed at some school you went to, and the whole time they knew it, the studies date back to the '70s that showed that they knew there were asbestos. They put a new name on it, which I guess if you don't list it in the ingredients, that it doesn't cause a problem.

Here, let me tell you this. The documents that I used in trial in the early days, Sumner Simpson documents, there are half a dozen documents that you read and it's the O M G moments. One of the documents says, "These people working around asbestos, make a good living with asbestos, let's let them die with asbestos." That was back in the '30s and then they kept it secret. This is the same deal. Johnson & Johnson was using talc mines, they were taking talc out of these mines contaminated with asbestos and they're trying to convince everybody, "Oh no there's..." well here's the bad news, Peter, they've actually visualized it with a microscopic technology. They've actually seen the asbestos inside the powder itself and you still have J&J saying, "No that's something different, we don't know what it is, but it's not asbestos."

It's the same defense firms again, Kirk and Alice on those who's defending the J&J again. Bury it, don't tell them what's out there, we'll hire a big power defense firm and see what we can do to unwind it. It's cheaper to pay lawyers than it is from the profits from the wrong doing.

Right, right. Let's take a break, I'm Mike Papantonio here with Peter Mougey. We'll be right back.