Picture: www.topmastersinhealthcare.com/
In a case that could halt the development of GM crops around the world, and thus the push by a few global corporations to gain control of the food supply, a court San Francisco this week awarded $289 million in damages to a former school groundskeeper, Dewayne Johnson, whose lawyers claimed Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller gave him terminal cancer. The award consists of $40 million in compensatory damages and $250 million in punitive damages.
Johnson’s trial was fast-tracked due to the severe state of his non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a cancer of the lymph system he says was triggered by Roundup and Ranger Pro, a similar glyphosate based herbicide that he was a=obliged by his job to use up to 30 times per year. His doctors didn’t think he’d live to live to see the verdict.
Johnson told the court that he had been involved in two accidents during his work in which he was soaked with the herbicide. The first of these occurred in 2012. Two years later, the 46-year-old father of two was diagnosed with lymphoma – which has since covered as much as 80% of his body in lesions.
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Dewayne Johnson listens in court to evidence in his lawsuit against Monsanto
Monsanto says it will appeal the verdict.
“Today’s decision does not change the fact that more than 800 scientific studies and reviews — and conclusions by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. National Institutes of Health and regulatory authorities around the world — support the fact that glyphosate does not cause cancer, and did not cause Mr. Johnson’s cancer,” Monsanto Vice President Scott Partridge said in a statement.
Monsanto is now a subsidiary of Germany’s Bayer AG, which closed on its $66 billion purchase of the agrochemical company in June.
On Tuesday, Johnson’s attorney Brent Wisner urged jurors to hold Monsanto liable and slap them with a verdict that would “actually change the world” – after arguing that Monsanto knew about glyphosate’s risks of cancer, but decided to ignore and bury the information.
According to a report in The Guardian, Johnson’s lawsuit against is the first such case against Monsanto to complete the full trial process over allegations that the chemical sold under the Roundup brand is linked to cancer. Thousands have made similar legal claims across the United States. Many of these are still tied up in the labyrinthine procedures of the American justice system and many other complainants have either run out of money or simply given up.
The Johnson case focused on the chemical glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide, which Monsanto began marketing as Roundup in 1974. The company began by presenting it as a “technological breakthrough” that could kill almost every weed without harming humans or the environment. –SHTFplan.com
In September, 2017 the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) concluded that glyphosates were not likely carcinogenic to humans, based on a decades-long study. In 2015, the World Health Organization (WHO)’s cancer arm issued an opposite statement – warning that glyphosate was “probably carcinogenic to humans.”
Johnson’s case is not part of the consolidated proceedings in Missouri, Delaware or California state court, where some 2,000 similar cases are pending. It’s also separate from a federal multidistrict litigation waiting to be heard by US District Judge Vance Chabria of San Francisco – who allowed hundreds of Roundup lawsuits to proceed to trial after ruling that there was sufficient evidence for a jury to hear the cases despite calling a plaintiff’s expert opinions “shaky.”
Documents released in August of 2017 led to questions over Monsanto’s efforts to influence the news media and scientific research and revealed internal debate over the safety of its highest-profile product, the weed killer Roundup.
As the New York Times commented last year, leaked internal emails, among other things, reveal ethical objections from former employees to “ghost writing” research studies that were pawned off as ‘independent’ analyses.
These documents detail the meaures to which the Monsanto was willing to resport in order to protect its image. Documents show that Henry I. Miller, an academic and a vocal proponent of genetically modified crops, asked Monsanto to draft an article for him that largely mirrored one that appeared under his name on Forbes’s website in 2015. Mr. Miller could not be reached for comment.
A similar issue appeared in academic research. A biologist involved in writing research funded by Monsanto, John Acquavella, a former Monsanto employee, appeared to express discomfort with the process, writing in a 2015 email to a Monsanto executive, “I can’t be part of deceptive authorship on a presentation or publication.” He also said of the way the company was trying to present the authorship: “We call that ghost writing and it is unethical.”
The newly disclosed emails also reveal internal discussions which cast some doubt over whether internal scientists actually believed in the company’s external messaging that Roundup was, in fact, safe. In the bigger picture these documents will throw into doubt legal judgements in many other cases, as they strongly suggest Monsanto have misled the courts in their evidence.
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