Philadelphia Jury Hits Monsanto with $2.25B Roundup Verdict | Hacker News Reader

Philadelphia Jury Hits Monsanto with $2.25B Roundup Verdict

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195 pointssva_82 comments

Polychlorinated Biphenyls, Agent Orange, 2,3,7,8-TCDD, aspartame, patented GM crops and now glyphosate the list goes on. Monsanto (now Bayer) is really living up to the name of "evil corporation".

https://dioxindorms.com/content/chronology.html

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41271-018-0146-8

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/feb/24/monsanto...

Wait, what, aspartame? You tried to slip that one in, didn't you.

It's been classed as an IARC Group 2B suspected carcinogen, this is new research (2023).

https://www.who.int/news/item/14-07-2023-aspartame-hazard-an...

https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/statement/2023/06/widely-u...

This is a category that includes pickles and cell phones. The standards for this category is if some study exists somewhere suggested that, in some quantity, an item might be carcinogenic, possibly only with certain animals. The studies do not require follow-ups or repeatability. It's the lowest standard that the IARC uses.

But you just threw that in with Agent Orange. I declare this a canonical example of someone with an axe to grind.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8227014/

The linked page doesn't appear to contradict the parent?

I knew it! The evil corporate overloads have been trying to kill us all of just for profit by selling delicious but cancerous pickles!

The word "suspected" does not appear on the report you linked. Rather it says it is a "possible" carcinogenic. Moreover

> The committee therefore reaffirmed that it is safe for a person to consume within this limit per day. For example, with a can of diet soft drink containing 200 or 300 mg of aspartame, an adult weighing 70kg would need to consume more than 9–14 cans per day to exceed the acceptable daily intake, assuming no other intake from other food sources.

While I do think that is an unreasonable amount for a normal person to consume, I've also met a person who would easily hit that number. Most of us should be safe though.

aspartame is one of the most studied substances in human history. It's fine, it's safe. It's not healthy per se unless it helps you kick the sugar habit, but it's a neutral substance.

To your endocrine system, it's neutral?

Yeah this is just a tip of an iceberg.

Read about Bayer's predecessors legacy during II WW of "medical" experimentation on humans in concentration camps, enslavement, tortures, supplying gas to mass killings and more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IG_Farben#World_War_II_and_the...

Did jury add anything to the large body of evidence that roundup is basically safe, with only flimsy studies showing effect more flimsy than your average psychology paper, despite being one of the most scrutinized chemicals in existence, and despite being used on massive scale?

Agreed on by multiple large scientific bodies, including the EPA.

Nah, they just reacted to a sob story. No different than NIMBYs playing up the "grandma vs evil developers", politicians pulling a "just think of the children", etc. Utterly disgusting.

Watched the movie Michael Clayton this morning which seems to be basically about Monsanto and Roundup. I know about the cases and it's always distressing to me because my dad was a farmer who grew round up ready canola and I grew up drinking water from a well on this farm. My dad is cancer free ATM, but it is unsettling to think about.

I wouldn't worry too much about it. The global and national cancer trends don't track Roundup entering the food system or the agricultural sector.

To the extent it might be a carcinogen, it's not a dominant environmental carcinogen relative to other forces.

Well, most people globally aren't drinking from a well near a farm that uses Roundup. So that isn't really relevant for this person.

But most everyone is eating food that was treated with Roundup during its cultivation. If it was an unsafe at any dose chemical like lead, the global medical numbers should bear that out by now. Meanwhile, levels are monitored at locations like farms where it's actively used.

If your dad drinks alcohol every now and then you probably don't need to worry too much about roundup, alcohol is a much stronger carcinogen and there is not even a debate about it like for glyphosate.

I have a sciences degree, and I'm not a complete weenie about some of the downright amazing things we have accomplished, but some time ago it occurred to me -- and I haven't really been able to rid myself of it -- that we have replaced some previously "mechanical" processes with chemicals, which we then haven't developed a good set of strictures around developing.

Pull a weed? No, spray a crop. We could polish a thing thing but instead we will apply a coating. And so forth. Now, "pulling weeds" doesn't spread. It doesn't end up in water and going downstream. The act of polishing doesn't end up in food.

I am beginning to think that chemical design should include facets like "breaks down with such and such a halflife at STP" (and then the same rules apply to the breakdown products) and "everyone involved who wants to say it is safe, down to the CEO, needs to bathe in this crap for ten years before accepting any kind of financial benefit."

Then again, I also spend a lot of time wondering how much of the "cide market" (insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, et al) could be replaced by wee robots trundling their way through rows of vegetables, detecting weeds and yanking them, applying small and targeted blasts of fungicide here and there, plucking away insects and their eggs, and so on. Would such robots be affordable? Could they break even against the chemical approach? Or would they cost more and would we collectively decide to pay that price?

There's a detail that is often missed in discussions about the use of roundup: it is not only used to kill weeds.

Roundup is also used right before harvesting as a 'drying agent' to control when the crop ripens. See, wheat is a pesky, messy living plant and it can grow and ripen at different rates even in a single field. This is an issue because if you harvest before it's ripe and dry it can rot and mold due to too much moisture. Another issue is the weather: if the wheat is supposed to ripen in 6 days but the weatherman says there'll be two weeks of rain starting in 3 days it may rot in the field before you ever had a chance to harvest.

The solution? Right before you're ready to harvest douse the grown wheat in roundup (yes wheat is resistant, just use way more roundup, it'll be fine). A few days later the whole field is nice and evenly dried out and ready to harvest. If the weather is a problem just douse it early, the yield will be a bit lower but at least the whole crop won't be lost. Two birds, one stone.

Oh and pay no mind to the elephant in the room that spraying lethal (to wheat) dose of herbicide on the kernels days before harvesting seems like a very different risk profile compared to killing weeds months before harvesting when the wheat is barely germinated. Rest assured, Monsanto's scientists have tested the flour and found that this dosing schedule makes way more money, er, I mean the amount of roundup that makes it's way into your food is way below the safe threshold.

Also I don't get the focus on cancer. There are other ailments that seem much more plausible, say, a long term low dose of a plethora of -icides wiping out your gut bacteria causing metabolic dysfunction and obesity. There has been a rise in obesity ever since this harvesting technology was introduced, but I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

Roundup being used as "drying agent", even I didn't know about that one. So much for me complaining about Sucralose and Aspartame, now we have glyphosate added to our foods, in large quantities. Shit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_desiccation#Systemic_desi...

And I wonder what the combined effects of all these chemicals in our foods are on our health. Something which the studies don't usually cover?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/06/the-we...

The wikipedia link says that its use as a drying agent in the States is uncommon...though not in Canada.

Do you have any proof that there are large amounts of round up left on wheat after it's processed and before it's sold to be used for things like flour or that round up is present all through the current food chain?

I suspect in coming years pulling weeds may become feasible with AI, better robotics and vision systems, but it'll be a while before that would be feasible on a grand scale like industrial farming. Maybe it could be used for organic in the beginning as a test bed in a higher profit industry.

Given infinite money, is it possible to build a robot /today/ that can do all the things you list, in a reliable manner, capable of scaling up to industrial farm levels?

Yes, it is: https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/farming-robot-...

That doesn't solve rust or potato beetles or hundreds of other pest or fungal infestations.

Yes, but it would be more expensive than current methods.

The “small targeted blasts” thing exists.

https://youtu.be/XH-EFtTa6IU?feature=shared

I guess that this somewhat contradicts Monsanto's real motto:

Without chemicals, life itself would be unprofitable.

This is so ridiculous, the science points to the fact that the claim that it causes cancer is not true... I really don't like the american justice system. We literally live next to coal plants that put chemicals in the air 24/7 that are certainly certainly causing cancer for people later...

You can find studies showing certain meats are correlated with cancer, can we sue the grocery stores?

As im my comment above, alcohol is the big one to compare to. There are statistics like "alcohol consumption accounts for approximately 6% of all cancers diagnosed in the US" [1], and absolutely no serious scientist or doctor doubts that it's a strong carcinogen. I really wonder why the lawyers that orchestrated the roudup cases never go after the breweries etc. I guess because most people like alcohol and ignore the health effects, there's just no chance to win a jury trial? And that's with alcohol's addiction and host of other health problems, too. Or is there some law that does not allow companies for causing health damage due to alcohol?

[1] https://www.cancer.org/cancer/risk-prevention/diet-physical-...

> You can find studies showing certain meats are correlated with cancer, can we sue the grocery stores?

When a grocery store starts to take over the production chain for both the meat and the process and chemicals involved and pushing their products globally as a solution, and being litigious to a stupid degree, and ... Then yeah, I hope we can sue the grocery store involved. (As long as the studies actually hold up and that specific store is causing health problems others aren't)

> This is so ridiculous, the science points to the fact that the claim that it causes cancer is not true.

I just Kagi'd it and UW says non-hodgkins up by 40% with roundup exposure. I guess the question would be "whose science".

I don’t understand why this comment is downvoted. The studies do show a link between non Hodgkin’s lymphoma and roundup.

And if you want to dispute the studies, fine. But Monsanto settled for $10B on the round up lawsuits. That should tell you something.

you don't suspect monsanto would pay to have negative comments downvoted in every corner of the internet?

We already know for a fact that the pharmaceutical companies have teams to manipulate social media through bot accounts. I don’t know why Beyer/Monsanto would be any different.

How do we know this?

Receipts, mostly.

Companies settle all the time without being guilty.

If it’s cheaper to just settle than fight it out, you settle.

My understanding is what complicates the science hears that we don't actually have a causal story, all of the evidence is correlative.

And broad correlative analysis of the link between non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and glyphosate is difficult to tease out because the leading cause of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma is HIV. The HIV numbers muddy up the wideband statistics a lot (for many reasons, including patients not being willing to disclose they have an STD), so depending on how the question was asked different research projects get different answers.

"up by 40%" only on a study of people living on or near farms where glyphosate is sprayed.

Actual probability you will get NHL from roundup if the figures are accurate (again, limited study results, no causation found), in the worst case, goes from 2% chance to 2.8% chance.

Amazingly, none of this considers the additives to roundup that aren't glyphosate, which everyone agrees are much more likely to hurt you. The case seems to hinge on the least harmful part of Roundup.

This whole case is a great example of a lack of scientific literacy and a whole lot of fear, combined with a dislike for large corporations, resulting in a whole lot of disinformation. Roundup might be bad for you, but we still don't actually know, because we have no causative proof.

I agree, we really don't know what the effects are, or even how to establish a set of criteria that we would look for in an empirical investigation that determined what its effects on human health are. That's why I say we should just keep spraying the fucking shit on all of our food, and wait for the science to come out before clutching at our pearls here folks!

exactly, in the court rooms you have scientists on each side of the case. They've all graduated from the same Ivy Leagues, just are getting paid by different teams.

I mean I would also support levying multi-billion dollar fines against coal plants. Frankly in terms of the negative externalities they have caused they probably owe that many times over.

The American coal industry employs less than 50,000 people. For $5B, you could close every coal plant, give every single person a $100,000 severance package and tell them to go find a job elsewhere.

This should probably be done.

> put chemicals in the air 24/7

That is super funny to me. That people obsess so much about food while they are living in the city and various poisons have direct contact with their blood on their every breath.

Different source, unpaywalled https://archive.md/mDous

I didn't notice there was a paywall upon submission. If you use bypass paywall clean[0], you won't see it either. But thanks for the link.

0. https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean

On one hand, this extension is great.

On the other hand, it has to be one of the most direct way I can contribute to the fall of actual journalism in the internet era, allowing myself to read quality content that the writer ask money for without ever being reminded that I could pay for it ...

Patrick Moore will settle this by offering to drink "perfectly safe"(tm) glyphosate.

> Philadelphia Jury Hits Monsanto with $2.25B Roundup Verdict

Haha, the vaccine doses thrown on the window in EU were more expensive.

Waiting for upcoming news about Monsanto spinning off the Roundup division into a new company that suddenly files for bankruptcy.

Monsanto hasn't been a separate company for years: Bayer bought them out for 63 billion in 2018: A coup for the Monsanto CEO, as Bayer's total market cap today is 34 billion, and that includes all the pharma and chemical work too, not just crop science.

When they were independent, their legal team had a very successful track record, but I am told the majority of them just retired with the very large windfall they got out of that merger. Given that Bayer has a different CEO than when the merger occurred, it'd not be crazy if Bayer jettisoned all of crop science away. For all the concerns about Roundup, I'd expect the Dicamba legal risks to weigh down the value of keeping crop science at all.

It might not be remembered as as silly a merger as AOL acquiring Time Warner, but it's close.

They had a good track record in court when they were American. As soon as a foreign company bought them, juries found an appetite to convict and impose freakishly large damages.

The difference in value in the stock market between tech corps and other industries is so absurd. I know it's based on the value each company can extract, not on their actual critical value of what they produce, so it makes total sense, but I believe this total disconnection between the stock market goal and "people/society" goal is part of why so many feel disenfranchised and disconnected from "the economy".

Why are they down so much?

The Roundup lawsuits are a factor. One of their largest products is an albatross.

It's only 2.5 bill. In the grand scheme, not that much. Or, are you saying that product line now goes to zero? I don't know how much they are making out of that line.

what is to stop the law firm from doing it again in another state?

It does stretch credibility that this kind of thing wasn't discovered during due diligence of the acquisition.

They didn’t expect to lose these cases. They think the scientific facts are in their favor.

I assume this comment is a reference to Purdue Pharma preemptively filing for bankrupcy after losing a bunch of lawsuits due to the (surely!) criminal way in which they--and the Sackler family that owns it--sold opiods.

However, as much as I hate the Sacklers, I have to pipe in here out of a respect for the truth (Gell-Mann Amnesia style).

The Purdue bankruptcy was not some sort of Machiavellian "get out of jail free" card. Rather, it is what is normally done when there are so many lawsuits on a company that it is likely they exceed the value of the company itself.

Everyone who sues and wins against Purdue will become a creditor of the company. But they will be owed much more than the company is worth. So who should get paid? The first person to sue? The last? The one worst off?

Parceling out the assets of a company among its creditors is the job of a bankruptcy court, and that is why Purdue declared bankruptcy preemptively. Not to screw over the creditors, but rather to protect them so that a judge can decide who gets what.

This is standard operating procedure when a company believes there are more creditors than it can pay, even if the creditors have not filed suit yet.

There are certainly horrible things about the way Purdue has been handled—chiefly among them that the members of the Purdue family are not being criminally prosecuted—but the whole bankruptcy thing is not one of them.

I would suggest reading Matt Levine's analyis of the whole debacle, both "The purdue bankruptcy didn't work (2021)" [0] and the follow up "Purdue Pharma's Bankruptcy works now (2023)" [1]

[0]: https://archive.is/BNzqi [1]: https://archive.is/lScV9

Isn't the issue not that Purdue declared bankruptcy, but that the Sacklers avoided any personal payment?

> I assume this comment is a reference to Purdue Pharma

sure, assume away. I was thinking more of J&J's talc=>asbestos, Alex Jones, and all of the other cases. It's not like the Sacklers are original thinkers. Some of us have memories longer than goldfishes

The J&J case is one of the most famous examples of "Texas two-step" bankruptcy, but I didn't know until now that there have only been four companies that used this strategy (all represented by the same law firm).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_two-step_bankruptcy

I was thinking of Dow/DuPont's Bhopal subsidiary [0]

0: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/bhopal-disa...

More likely Monsanto appeals and the damages get much smaller. Juries like to award much larger sums than judges.

Indeed. 250 million compensation + 2 billion punitive is an immense amount of money.

The median wrongful death settlement in California is between $250,000 and $500,000, and the average payout for car accident deaths in the United States is around $1.5 million.

I dont really understand the criteria around what counts as liability for a defective product.

Cars and guns routinely kill people, but are useful tools. Roundup or baby powder kills someone in unintuitive and statistically remote ways, and you have multi-billion dollar settlements.

It usually has something to do with willfully hiding evidence that the product is inherently unsafe and avoiding safety protocols that would save lives. The canonical case in my mind is the Ford Pinto. They knew the flaws in the design existed but valued the cost to fix them greater than the societal cost of deaths caused by the flaws. You find these in a lot of cases like this, big tobacco, Johnson and Johnson, Purdue, etc, often have essentially evil knowing decisions to hide safety issues with their product.

Cars (and to a lesser degree guns) are pretty well regulated and basically as long as you follow the spirit of the regulations and engage above board with regulators you’ll be ok. It’s a mutually agreed upon risk management between the public and the companies. There are definitely cases where a danger is known and thought acceptable and the law or regulation shifts, and you’re protected to some degree as long as you were in compliance and weren’t hiding an otherwise unknown risk. Likewise there are things you discover later and as long as you act on it in a forthright way you’re ok.

But risk management isn’t about avoiding all risks. It’s about balance, and being rigorously transparent.

How many years after the merger with Bayer can the merger be rolled back because of hidden evidence and the enormous damages?

IANAL but punitive damages are meant to punish defendants to force them to reform and deter future misconduct. They're supposed to be outrageously large, otherwise they're toothless. It's kind of the grand bargain in liability law in the US - fewer regulators and regulations but courts can hand down punishing rulings.

In a car or gun based wrongful death lawsuit, usually the defendant is the user not the manufacturer so punishing them with a $100 million ruling doesn't do anything - a $1.5 million ruling is already life changing unless they've got bulletproof liability insurance. They usually don't have anywhere near that kind of money and a ruling against them won't prevent future users from shooting or hitting someone with a car, whereas corporations are (ostensibly) able to make proper long term risk calculations.

This makes me think of the Oberlin College judgment. The jury awarded more than the law allowed to Gibson's bakery, so the $44 million dollar judgment was cut by the judge to $25.

Obviously, both Monsanto and Purdue are in a whole different class and scale of harm, but the law can and does cap damages. I don't know why the limits weren't made plain to the jurors, as it just drug out the procedure.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibson's_Bakery_v._Oberlin_C...

Reduced to $25 million, to be clear.

I feel like we need to acknowledge that 12 average jury pool members are probably not the best panel of scientific experts to determine whether a chemical is carcinogenic. Much less calculate the damages involved.

Like at this point it would be more scientific to run a Facebook poll.

Jury trials are a great system for criminal justice but kinda need to admit this is not the same.

So the average citizen is a barely-conscious slobbering fool. While Bayer Monstanto, the multibillion dollar organization that knowingly shipped HIV-contaminated blood products somehow deserves your defense? Alarm bells are ringing.

The average IQ is 100.

[George Carlin joke here.]

If the defense presented compelling epidemiologist testimony and statistics, it's difficult to bullshit concrete evidence. The jury just had to act as a marginally-adequate bullshit detector. The premise of a pool of disinterested, random individuals settling disputes is occasionally problematic in isolation but superior to duels at dawn, Hatfields vs McCoys, or troubling the corn or pimentos.

> it would be more scientific to run a Facebook poll

The jurors have spent many, many hours personally hearing testimony and examining evidence, all of which is vetted to meet courtroom standards.

Do you consider yourself fit to serve on such a jury?

That’s the point. Jury is a bunch of regular people. I think it’s actually pretty cool because otherwise decisions are based on “legal mumbo jumbo” that no “normal” person would ever be able to understand.

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