
Johnson and Johnson knew for decades that asbestos lurked in its Baby Powder - r_singh
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/johnsonandjohnson-cancer/
======
atburrow
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18684384](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18684384)

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vonseel
I would like to highlight this comment and HN policy on reposts:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

Particularly, this article received significant attention just in the last few
days and should be removed as a duplicate.

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lordnacho
We shouldn't be surprised that this sort of thing happens from time to time.

What are the incentives?

If you're an exec in charge of some product, you want to sell the product. You
don't want to be pulling it, you'll never get promoted like that. And you know
more about how to move product than about asbestos testing results, that's for
sure.

And chances are nothing will be discovered. And if it is discovered it will
take a long time and you'll be long gone. And if it turns out to be really
bad, you don't personally pay. The company pays.

Not saying I have an answer. I'm sure there's quite a few people within a
company that would know about the findings, and they all have reasons to
either keep things going, or you could call it a psychological bias towards
diminishing the severity in their own minds.

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snek
> you want to sell the product

but if it has a carcinogen in it? do you really still want to? i fail to
understand how humans can behave like this.

~~~
mikeash
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends
upon his not understanding it!” - Upton Sinclair

This quote gets brought out a lot, for good reason, but I think people don’t
quite grasp its meaning. It’s often understood as meaning that people will
play dumb in order to resist you. But it goes deeper than that. A person will
literally have a difficult time understanding something if that understanding
will put their livelihood on the line.

I would wager that essentially everybody involved in this process had a
twisted understanding of the problem that left them convinced that what they
were doing was harmless.

~~~
redmaverick
When one personally doesn't know the victims it is easy to rationalize.

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JoeAltmaier
Everybody knew? Talc deposits often occur near asbestos deposits. There's a
govt standard for 'cosmetic' talc that addresses asbestos content, that's been
around since 1973.

~~~
jasongill
Did you read the entire article? The FDA was guided by J&J to set the standard
at 10x higher than their original proposal, and to reduce testing to an
inexpensive test that only detects the least common type of asbestos.
Basically, the article contends, the standard that "everybody knew" about is
meaningless and was not much more than positive press for J&J.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
...and is the health issue of talcum powder real? Is that standard wrong? Is
it's risk above the environmental noise level of cancer-causing substances?

Anything else is not much more than ragging on J&J.

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cm2187
When I read about something like that, I’d like to hear more than “traces of”.
I’d like to see concentrations and levels of concentrations from which it is
considered toxic. Products can even have traces of radioactive material while
being harmless.

~~~
jasongill
Did you read the article? They explain that "traces of" was actually as high
as 3% in some samples. The bulk of the article explains the tests performed
over time including the results of concentration. Not sure what your complaint
is, they even link to the original test result documents.

~~~
rightbyte
3% of other (minerals?) than talk. Not 3% asbestos to make that clear.

~~~
cm2187
And even then, without a dangerous threshold level, the number is meaningless.

~~~
objektif
How about none? Is it advertised or listed as containing asbestos in the
ingredient list? Do you want to use it on your baby?

~~~
cm2187
"None" doesn't exist in nature. Every product is always contaminated by all
sort of chemicals. It's always a matter of concentration. The water with which
you prepare you baby milk likely contains cyanide, lead or arsenic. Just not
in high enough dose to matter.

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sschueller
If people started tossing J&J baby powder at J&J executives would that be
assault with a deadly weapon?

~~~
NPMaxwell
One exposure might not be sufficient to create a deadly cancer.

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lifeisstillgood
The legal discovery process is an interesting one here - we are seeing
documents almost 50 years old here, paper records of what, prima facie is
damning behaviour.

But who keeps records for fifty years any more? My BigCo Employers delete my
mails after a quarter usually. The idea of my emails being dragged up in 20
years is crazy

Edit: I meant to say that new practises like deleting emails are likely to
ensure that crimes like this but happening today may well not get discovered,
or at least prosecuted.

Good audit trails are vital for justice - and by deleting them are we just
encouraging fake news - a lack of trust in what did happen? I have a suspicion
that deleting ones organisational memory is likely to be more destructive

~~~
rleigh
Emails are one thing, but product QC results and related communications might
well be retained for decades. Not just for liability reasons, but because
trends in process behaviour and performance can be observed and acted upon,
and correlated with changes to suppliers, machinery, workers' shift patterns,
and other factors. This can affect the bottom line.

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NPMaxwell
Leaded gas. Asbestos insulation. Cigarettes. Fossil fuels. High schools would
do well to put on All My Sons every 3 years
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_My_Sons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_My_Sons)

"All My Sons is based upon a true story... how in 1941–43 the Wright
Aeronautical Corporation based in Ohio had conspired with army inspection
officers to approve defective aircraft engines destined for military use"

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onetimemanytime
If it can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that people died because of
this, and that execs knew the results and danger and ignored them, why
shouldn't the state(s) charge them personally with murder /manslaughter ? In
the end someone, a living, breathing human being, made the final decision to
ju$t keep going.

Let them explain it to the jury. Asbestos was found in powder and people died
because of it (assuming both can be proven--a judge will have to convinced
first and then it goes to trial.)

Money is one part of the equation, you can be jailed for life for murder and
asked to pay $15million for killing that person.

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user5994461
Wonder if they sell the same product in Europe. I don't think we have a
similar exception as the USA to allowing putting asbestos in cosmetics.

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Teichopsia
It is worrisome that current, and future "leaders" are discussing the ethics
and other nuanced nitpickings.. as if this were a debate class. There should
be one - correct - answer.

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nickbauman
The whole purpose of making a corporation is to mitigate risk in the first
place. That's literally why they came into being. Secondly, it is to
concentrate financial power to pursue a joint mission, usually profit. So with
these two design forces, there's a structural incentive in the short term for
these things to happen. A decades-long awareness of unethical dealings is
another side effect of this design: externalizing costs onto society at large.

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rasengan
When companies like Marriott and JJ are doing things like this, people incur
great losses and there is little to no repurcussion to the companies.

Meanwhile, some guy in the street will go to prison for selling some weed.

All those who did this at JJ honestly deserves a life sentence at a minimum
given abestos exposure leads to mesothelioma.

This is some diabolical stuff - something out of a movie, akin to for example
contaminating the water supply in Batman.

So evil.

~~~
r_singh
Big corps who can do anything to capture market share and have some sort
leverage over the Government cannot be trusted.

I guess people just forget about all ethics when huge debt / investment /
incentive is involved. Leverage over media and governments along with an army
of lawyers and bean counters just makes this whole thing possible.

Meanwhile globalisation has arguably made it more difficult for SMEs to market
/ sell products in industries within which big corps have huge interests.

~~~
fma
This is a big reason why I'm for regulation when it comes to health, and
environment. Somehow conservative Americans are believed that the 'invisible
hand of the market' will solve all problems. But companies will always be in
it to make money if they feel they can get away with cutting corners.

Would we rather err on cutting a few percent here and there from company
profits due to overhead and inefficiency of regulation? Or err on harming
people and the planet?

~~~
armitron
We saw how the 'invisible hand of the market' played out in the housing
collapse of 2008. Even the clown known as Alan Greenspan admitted that his
ideology was shaken.

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philtar
I have a question which I don't believe is answered: these people who knew,
where they using the powder on their own babies? Because they could be due to
mental minimization of the risks associated with the use of their own
products.

If they are, and they could be, then humans are more pro-ignorance than I ever
thought.

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dgzl
Honestly, reading that entire thing was exhausting. How obvious does it have
to be before we change as a people.

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mannykannot
I am speculating about motives here, but it seems to me that this sort of
behavior is an example of an all-too-common form of the 'banality of evil',
Hannah Arendt's observation / thesis that the holocaust was enabled and
implemented by a large cadre of rather ordinary people who were 'just doing
their jobs'. In this case, there was no nucleus of genocidal, powerful and
violently coercive psychopaths driving the process; it may have been almost
self-organizing out of people 'just doing their jobs' in response to the
initial mistake of shipping a tainted product, and either not thinking of the
ethical issues, or actively suppressing them (some of both, I imagine), all
helped along by a dose of self-interest.

This is not intended to be in any way an excuse for what happened here; if
anything, it is a cautionary tale, as any of us might, one day, be faced with
a choice between just doing our job and doing the right thing.

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ekianjo
Double posting. It was just on HN yesterday.

~~~
r_singh
I missed it yesterday and didn't search for it before submitting so that's my
bad.

But if it's getting upvotes, I guess it's because other people missed it as
well.

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foolrush
Makes these stories more relevant.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/23/business/johnson-talc-
can...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/23/business/johnson-talc-cancer.html)

Almost as if the “free market” doesn’t regulate itself and generate ethical
results...

~~~
refurb
You realize that the FDA (regulator) was award of these results and still
didn’t pull it off the market?

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andrepd
Yes, because the so-called "regulators" are in the hands of the companies
which _they are supposed to supervise_. It's a complete perversion.

~~~
refurb
As someone who has worked with the FDA I find this laughable. The FDA has very
few qualms about bringing the full force of the US govt down on a company.

Maybe, just maybe, the situation is a little more complex than you realize?

