The size of the award sends a message that should be heard by the whole drug and medical device industry: Stop placing profits over safety. Or, as the women’s lawyer, Mark Lanier, put it in his closing remarks, “You don’t jack with people’s lives like this.”
Johnson & Johnson and its peers were once lauded as a collective of hero-innovators and credited with bringing an avalanche of lifesaving, world-changing technology from lab bench to patient bedside. Today they are more readily associated with rampant price gouging, the worst drug overdose epidemic in modern history and a steady beat of cases similar to the talc-cancer one, in which profitable products caused real harm.
