Court Shows Johnson & Johnson Injected Black Prisoners with Asbestos in the ’70s

WORLD’S LARGEST PRODUCER OF HEALTHCARE PRODUCTS

Court documents unsealed during the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) talcum powder litigation reveal that the company funded a 1971 study in which Pennsylvania prisoners, most of them African American, were “injected subcutaneously with asbestos.” 

Knowledge of the experiments has been public for some time, but J&J’s involvement has only just been recognised, according to Bloomberg. 

This news comes after unsealed documents were released in recent J&J lawsuits, which found the company knew for decades that asbestos “lurked in some of its baby powder” products.

According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the questions surrounding asbestos-contaminated talcum powder “have been raised since the 1970s.” From 1972 to 1975, J&J failed to inform the FDA that at least three tests of their baby powder came back showing “rather high” levels of asbestos.

The company said it “deeply regrets the conditions under which these studies were conducted.”  Also adding, “at the time of these studies, nearly 50 years ago, testing of this nature among this cohort set was widely accepted, including by prominent researchers, leading public companies, and the U.S. government itself,” J&J told Fierce Pharma. 

PRISON EXPERIMENTS

Funded by entities like Dow Chemical, J&J and the U.S. government, hundreds of prisoners were experimented on by University of Pennsylvania dermatologist Albert Klingman. Participants were paid anywhere from $10 to $300 to take part in the experiments, said Allen Hornblum, an ex-prison social worker turned journalist.

Knowledge of these experiments became public in 1998, after Mr Hornblum released his book “Acres of Skin,” exposing many experiments conducted over the course of two decades – without formal consent. 

Prisoners “receive[d] injections of talcum and of both types of asbestos in their lower backs to study skin reactions,” wrote the BMJ. Researchers found that the chrysotile or white form of asbestos, the most commonly encountered type of asbestos, had the “biggest effect” on inmates’ skin after injection. 

Further studies were conducted comparing the effects of talc (baby powder) to asbestos on human skin, as talc is typically found and mined near naturally occurring asbestos deposits. This makes the production of talc-based baby powder a risky endeavour. 

ASBESTOS BABY POWDER

In May of 2020, J&J announced it was pulling all its talc-based baby powder from shelves in the United States and Canada after thousands of lawsuits were filed alleging their product caused cancer. The majority of the over 40,000 still pending claimants are women.  

Christina Prudencio, a 35-year old California based teacher, who showed her lifelong J&J baby powder exposure resulted in asbestos-linked terminal cancer, was awarded $26.4 million in 2021. 

Dallas Business Journal reported in 2021 that a jury also awarded a 71-year-old woman $40 million “agreeing that Johnson and Johnson Baby Powder caused pleural mesothelioma.”

Since lawsuits began in 2013, J&J has paid a whopping $3.5 billion to cover settlements over their baby powder suits, $2.1 billion of which was awarded to 22 Missouri women by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2021. LTL Management LLC, the Johnson & Johnson subsidiary responsible for J&J’s baby powder products, filed for bankruptcy the same year. 

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