OAKLAND, Calif. (CN) - In January 2015, Monsanto executive Dan Jenkins wrote an email to a number of his colleagues expressing concern about the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s upcoming review of glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsanto’s popular weed killer Roundup.
“IARC- they are sending delegates (trying to get names) that are knowledgeable re- gly from EDSP [endocrine disruption] and oncogenicity standpoint,” Jenkins wrote.
Monsanto toxicologist William Heydens wrote back, “The one billion dollar question is how could it impact?”
For attorney Brent Wisner with Baum, Hedlund, Aristei & Goldman, who represents a couple claiming they both got non-Hodgkin lymphoma from decades of using Roundup, a $1 billion punitive damages verdict would send a strong message to Monsanto about its ethics in marketing a hazardous product.
“One billion is a number that changes things,” he said.
During closing arguments in the now-third trial over Roundup’s role in causing non-Hodgkin lymphoma, Wisner reminded the jury about that email exchange between Jenkins and Heydens.
He called Monsanto’s liability “the billion dollar question.”
His comments marked the end of a five-week trial that saw accusations of Roundup ads being targeted at jurors, eavesdropping on jurors in hallways, and even celebrity appearances by Daryl Hannah, Neil Young and Oliver Stone.
Wisner’s clients, Alva and Alberta Pilliod, claim they both got subsets of the lymphoma from decades of using Roundup. Alva was diagnosed in 2011; Alberta in 2015. Both are in remission, but their cancers have left them with lasting brain damage and other long term side effects.
They sued Monsanto after IARC classified glyphosate as a “probable human carcinogen” in 2015.
Wisner said the lack of warning on Roundup bottles robbed the Pilliods of their choice in whether to use the product.
“No chemical company can take that choice away from us,” Wisner said. They can’t not tell us information. And if they suspect a product may cause cancer, they have to give us a choice. If a husband and wife develops cancer, they have to pay.”
He recalled Alva Pilliod’s testimony from weeks earlier, where he told the jury that he received a call from the hospital saying his wife couldn’t be resuscitated. Alva thought his wife was dead.
“That moment didn’t have to happen,” Wisner said. “Their cancer didn’t have to happen.” The Pilliods would never have touched Roundup if they had known it was unsafe, he said. “They weren’t given that choice because of the choices Monsanto made over the last 40 years.”
Roundup was introduced to the market in 1974 after it was approved for sale by the Environmental Protection Agency. Wisner denounced a 1973 study by Industrial Bio-Test, the contract lab that performed the testing on which the EPA’s approval was based, as “scientific fraud.”
He cited a scandal where IBT was caught in an audit having falsified its data. Monsanto toxicologist Paul Wright suspiciously began working for IBT the year before Roundup was approved, Wisner said, and was later jailed for his role in the fraud.
“This was a product that was literally born in fraud,” Wisner said.
Tarek Ismail, Monsanto's attorney with Goldman Ismail Tomaselli Brennan & Baum, reminded the jury during his closing statement that the IBT scandal was “not a Monsanto issue” and that “38 different companies were impacted.”
Wisner also pointed to Monsanto’s efforts to get glyphosate taken off of the EPA’s classification as a “Class C” possible human carcinogen by hiring pathologist Dr. Marvin Kuschner to find an additional tumor in a group of mice not dosed with glyphosate, saying Monsanto “bought and paid for” Kuschner’s opinion.