Historic verdict in the lawsuit against U.S. agribusiness giant Monsanto. In a groundbreaking decision, a jury in California has ordered Monsanto to pay $289 million in damages to a school groundskeeper who developed cancer after regularly using the weed killer Roundup. The 46-year-old man, Dewayne Johnson, has non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
The jury at San Francisco’s Superior Court of California deliberated for three days before finding Monsanto had failed to warn Johnson and other consumers of the cancer risks posed by its weed killers. Johnson’s was the first lawsuit to go to trial alleging glyphosate causes cancer. Filed in 2016, it was fast-tracked for trial due to the severity of Johnson’s illness.
Johnson’s attorneys said jurors for the first time were able to see internal company documents proving Monsanto has known for decades that glyphosate and Roundup could cause cancer. Monsanto is a unit of the multinational pharmaceutical corporation Bayer and now faces more than 5,000 similar lawsuits across the United States.
Brent Wisner talking:
This verdict is, without question, truly historic. I mean, what Mr. Johnson has done, taking on this massive corporation, the courage, the tenacity and the willingness to speak out against what he believed was a real problem, is truly spectacular. And this jury heard it. I mean, this verdict is groundbreaking. It’s precedential. It’s something that I think Monsanto and its shareholders, particularly at Bayer, are hearing loud and clear and realizing that they have a problem with this product, and they have to start warning people that it can cause cancer.
Lee is just an amazing man. I mean, he started working at the Benicia School District in 2012. He was actually promoted. Originally, he was just sort of running mail around the school, and then he became an integrated pest manager. And as part of that job, he was spraying Roundup on these various school campuses as part of the school district. He would spray upwards of 150 gallons a day trying to handle the weed situation. During that time, he was exposed repeatedly, repeatedly. And prior to that, he had perfect skin. After that, he started developing these tumors on his skin. And they didn’t know what it was at first, and they discovered it was a rare type of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma that manifests in the skin. And the cancer got worse. It got worse. It got worse.
Mr. Johnson actually reached out to Monsanto while he was spraying, to ask them, “Hey, is there some connection between this product and this cancer that I’m getting?” And they said they would call him back, and then they never did. Then he called back a second time, and he continued to spray, waiting to hear back from Monsanto, and they never called. And what we learned was that his cancer, while he was spraying, it transformed. It went from a relatively controllable type of cancer to one that’s essentially a death sentence. And, you know, the fact that Monsanto never called him back and the fact that they never warned him deprived him of the ability to make an informed choice. And Mr. Johnson, you know, when he finally put two and two together, he called us up, and we took it to trial, and sort of history was made.
this idea that there’s 800 studies that test Roundup and say that it’s safe is just a fabrication. The studies he’s talking about are largely not related to cancer. We’re talking about skin irritation, eye irritation, things that really have nothing to do with the issues here. When you talk about cancer, we’re talking about 20 or so studies. Six or seven of them are in humans; the rest are in animals. And those studies, as the jury was shown, are almost completely positive. So, that’s just, fact number one, incorrect.
And the second thing that’s really important is this idea that it has a 40-year history of safety. I mean, almost absent from the conversation is that for the first 20 years Roundup was actually approved based on fraud. I mean, it was coming from a laboratory that has been known—people were indicted, people went to jail, and that was actually a former Monsanto employee. So, this idea that it has a 40-year record of safety glosses over a 20-year history of fraud, at least at the very beginning.
And the last thing is—and this is really important—is that Mr. Partridge doesn’t say Roundup doesn’t cause cancer; he says glyphosate. And he does that intentionally, because he knows that glyphosate is different than Roundup. Now, glyphosate is part of Roundup, but Roundup is a combined product of glyphosate plus a bunch of other chemicals that make glyphosate significantly more potent. And one of the things that the jury is really focused on, this jury in our case, was that there’s a synergistic effect of the glyphosate and the other chemicals. And the simple fact is, Monsanto has never tested the carcinogenicity of the combined product. And this omission is glaring, and it’s intentional. In fact, we have internal documents that say, “We do not want to look at this issue because we’re afraid of what we’re going to see.” And the jury heard all this, and they rejected this idea that it’s a safe product, that it doesn’t cause cancer. And they said not only does it cause cancer, but that Monsanto acted with malice in doing so. I think that’s really important.
there’s a lot of documents. But what they really show is sort of a rampant corporate culture that has no interest in looking at whether or not their product is safe, but have an interest in attacking science that doesn’t suit their business agenda. And that’s just simply what we see. When a bad study comes out, the emails that circulate amongst Monsanto employees is, “How do we combat this? How do we fight this? How do we take this person out?” It’s actually given a name within Monsanto; it’s called “freedom to operate.” And they actually have a budget assigned to this particular action.
But in addition to all that, I mean, it shows, without question, that, at least starting 20 years ago, Monsanto has known that their product can cause cancer, and has gone out of its way to ignore it and/or fight any science that suggests a link. And we see this happening amongst all the independent scientists that have looked at this, and there’s hundreds of them, who all look at this and say, “You know, you’ve got a problem here.” And instead of doing something about it, Monsanto simply says, “You know, let’s take away their funding,” or “Let’s go after the university,” or “Let’s put political or scientific pressure on these scientists to make them back off.” And a lot of scientists, when we first got involved in this litigation said, “Listen, I think it causes cancer, but I can’t help you. I don’t want to fight Monsanto. They’re bullies.” And that’s what the documents show.
So the compensatory damages are really what—the amount of money that it would take to make Mr. Johnson, you know, his family whole, to kind of—I mean, I don’t know how you pay for the pain and suffering associated with the type of cancer he has, but that’s what the jury came up with. And that was around $40 million.
The punitive damages are not really about Mr. Johnson; they’re really about Monsanto. They are about looking at what Monsanto has done, and asking, “Does that need to be punished? And if so, what’s the amount of money to not only punish Monsanto, but to deter future wrongful conduct?”
And when I was talking to the jury in our closing argument, I told them that this was a chance to send a message to Monsanto, that this was a chance to actually maybe even change the world. And I think that resonated with the jurors, because they saw that if they could make Monsanto pay a certain amount of money, that it actually might lead to future correct conduct, so the next person that calls Monsanto or the next person that uses Roundup can make that decision with an informed choice.
And I think it’s important—no one is saying it should be banned. OK? No one’s saying we should take it off the market. I mean, people still smoke cigarettes today, right? But they smoke cigarettes knowing the risks. And that’s all we’re asking for here, is “Monsanto, just disclose the risks. Warn.” And if they can do that, then they can start taking steps in the right direction.
And unfortunately, the answer is a little disturbing. So, one of the—some of the evidence that we showed Monsanto—I’m sorry, showed the jury about Monsanto was a very kind of unhealthy and kind of creepy relationship between Monsanto and the regulators at the EPA. We have text messages, email conversations, where various EPA employees are actually going out of their way to stop other agencies from investigating this issue, and going out of their way to sort of gain approval for Monsanto. And that’s disturbing, right? Because the regulators are supposed to be detached. They’re supposed to be doing an objective and honest assessment.
And, you know, this regulatory EPA did not do that. In fact, they convened a scientific advisory panel to critique what the EPA was doing. And these independent scientists came together, and they unanimously agreed on one fact: that the EPA was not following its guidelines. So the reason why the EPA is giving Monsanto special treatment is actually unknown, but there’s a lot of smoke, and I suspect there’s a fire. And, you know, the Department of Justice has actually opened an investigation into this exact issue, although I am not holding my breath that we will see the fruits of that investigation under this current administration.
– the French government promised in May glyphosate would be banned for its main uses by 2021 and for all its uses within five years.
And actually, Germany is taking a similar approach. Austria. A whole host of European countries are saying, “We don’t agree with our European regulators. We agree with the International Agency for Research on Cancer.” And they’re taking a lot of important steps to actually banning this product in Europe. And if that happens, then you would have to think that the U.S. would at least listen to this outcry. But, you know, again, I’m not holding my breath with the current administration.
And that’s really a problem here, because, you know, there is an incentive to use this stuff because it helps you sell more crops, right? So it’s not like there’s not a—the synergy between the financial interests and the safety interests are not aligned here. And the problem is that the people who are paying for the pesticides are usually not the people spraying them. And so we have a lot of immigrant workers, particularly here in California, who are out there spraying this stuff. They’re not being told about the risks. They’re not given proper precautions. And then, of course, you know, they’re being marginalized by the legal system because of their immigration status.
And so, you know, it’s a real public health crisis, and it’s something that I think the EPA needs to step in and do something about. California has actually taken steps. The state of California has determined it is a substance known to cause cancer. And they’re actually having a fairly protracted legal battle with Monsanto, trying to force Monsanto to warn. But again, that’s a sort of a legal fight that I hope, you know, California will prevail on.
_____
Brent Wisner
attorney and the lead trial counsel for Dewayne Lee Johnson in a lawsuit against Monsanto.
— source democracynow.org | 2018/8/14