Let's talk talc

Let’s talk about talc

The stuff you’ve probably got in your bathroom cabinet. If you’re a woman it's part of a complex daily, skin-drying regime and if you’re a man, you feel strangely weirded out applying clouds of scented dust to your nether regions to make them smell like a baby’s behind.

And it's the stuff you also use to make your baby’s behind smell like anything other than a 1960’s music festival latrine after 3 days.

And it’s the last part that is the most worrying of a growing scandal that’s been brewing for nearly 80 years.

Court documents have revealed that personal care and pharma giant Johnson & Johnson (J&J) knew its talc contained asbestos as early as the 1950s.

Asbestos is a natural contaminate to all types of talc because the two minerals naturally occur together.

You can’t have one without the other.

Like wedding celebrations and '(I've Had) The Time of My Life'.

Geologically, talc is the softest mineral; you won’t find it causing any fights. It’s a hydrous magnesium silicate often used in beauty products.

Talc is also used as a thickening agent for lubricants and is an ingredient in ceramics, paints, and roofing materials.

Huh.

And if you know anything about asbestos, you’ll know that it’s bad. It was commonly used in British construction until we all found out about how toxic it is, and all had to pay thousands of pounds to have it removed from our houses to be disposed of like a World War II bunker buster.

So whose decision was it to carry on selling material that millions of consumers use on our most delicate and sensitive areas and on our most delicate and sensitive humans?

In 2018, tests from several independent laboratories found asbestos in Johnson & Johnson’s talc from 1971 to the early 2000s, but that the company failed to report the findings to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. This scandal has been growing since then.

Johnson & Johnson announced in August 2022 it would discontinue global sales of talcum powder in 2023. It ended sales of its talc-based baby powder in the U.S. and Canada in 2020 but continued to sell it internationally.

But simply removing a toxic product from sale because you can no longer gaslight your way past the problem isn’t the end of it.

That’s the sort of thing a company does when a foreign agent is discovered. Like when a series of poisoning deaths resulted from the tampering of Tylenol products in the Chicago metropolitan area in 1982.

The manufacturer responsibly withdrew the product and received positive coverage for its handling of the crisis.

That manufacturer was Johnson & Johnson.

I accept that when a company makes hundreds of products designed for use at times of medical need, problems may occur and compensation may be paid.

But a bigger problem comes when a company hides a scandal and pretends like there’s nothing to see.

Johnson & Johnson is no better than Philip Morris or British American Tobacco,

who outright knew how deadly their products were to consumers, yet continued to sell them to grow their profits - even after millions of deaths, scientific evidence and falling sales. If their products are outlawed in one country, they pivot and sell them where they’re not outlawed.

But that doesn’t change the fact that every single one of their c-suite goes to bed at night, knowing definitively that their product is causing death and misery.

When the laws are for the protection of the company, we have a problem.

I hope that Johnson & Johnson are made to suffer for the corporate indifference they have displayed, knowing the harm their products have caused consumers who were kept in the dark, lied to and then cynically separated into those that know and should be cared about and those that don’t know and don’t have a choice.

But will the company every be called to account for its crimes? Let’s hope that the legal case against the Sackler family, the family-owned medical group behind the development and continued pumping and dumping of Oxycontin on the global market, provides some sort of indication.

Despite the family’s use of its billions to pay off legal damages, they have not been allowed to hide from responsibility.

Perhaps we might see the same treatment for Johnson & Johnson.

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