Gardner Harris

to the opioid crisis than Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers.

So Johnson & Johnson started selling baby powder in the 1800s, in the late 1800s.

The first product that Johnson & Johnson sold were these kind of bandages that could cause skin irritation.

So they started including with certain ones of these bandages these little tins of talc.

Talc is the smoothest mineral there is.

And people started asking just for talc refills, and Johnson & Johnson said, well, let's start just selling baby powder.

The problem is that talc and asbestos are basically the same thing.

They absolutely have the same chemical constituents, and it just is a little bit of difference in time and pressure

depending upon whether something turns into talc or something turns into asbestos.

But the two are inextricably linked.

So asbestos deposits always have talc in them, and talc deposits always have asbestos in them.

You cannot separate these two things together.

completely.

And let's just back up, Shamita, and talk about asbestos.

By the middle of the 20th century, there wasn't a car, a boat, a house, a train that didn't have asbestos in it.

But beginning in the 1950s, researchers started learning that even tiny, microscopic amounts of asbestos could lead to cancer.

So

As the 1960s progress, researchers start issuing these more and more alarmist warnings about, we need to get asbestos out of our lives because there's a certain kind of cancer that only asbestos causes.

It's called mesothelioma, and it's a cancer of the lining of the lung.

And mesothelioma rates were soaring.