MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow ridiculed Johnson & Johnson's corporate reputation after their stock prices went up following a half-a-billion judgment against the pharmaceutical giant.
Cleveland County, Oklahoma District Judge Thad Balkman filed a $572 million judgment against the company on Monday.
The ruling revealed that Johnson & Johnson ran a "pseudoaddiction" website saying the solution was to prescribe more opiates.
"If you’re a giant public-facing U.S. Corporation, one way to know if you have been very bad or people think you have been very bad, is if a judge, say, in Oklahoma rules from the bench against you, holding you liable for some of the worst things that have happened to Americans in the past 20 years, and that judge orders you as a company to pay more than $572 million for what you have done -- the judge orders you to pay more than half a billion dollars -- one way to know that you have been a very bad company or at least people perceive you to have been very bad, is if in reaction to that news, your stock price as a company actually goes up 5% because, 'whew, that’s a relief.' Everybody thought you were so bad it was possible you were going to be paying billions of dollars, like $10 billion, $15 billion, $17 billion," Maddow reported.
"They’ll have to pay $572 million unless they’re able to turn this thing around on appeal, and I swear their stock price went up in response because people thought it was going to be so much worse than even that," she noted.
"This ruling today in Oklahoma holding Johnson & Johnson accountable for its role in fueling the American opioid epidemic that has claimed more than 400,000 American lives, this is a ruling that will be appealed by the company, but their shareholders were delighted today," she continued. "The state of Oklahoma had asked for more than $17 billion from Johnson & Johnson to cover the full cost of the injury to the state of Oklahoma and its citizens that has been caused by the opioid epidemic in part fueled by Johnson & Johnson which the state in their case called a 'kingpin of the opioid drug trade.'"
"This was a landmark decision today. This is the first trial verdict to hold a pharmaceutical company culpable for the opioid catastrophe in this country. I know you’ve heard about companies being required to pay a lot of money, those have all been settlements," Maddow explained. "There’s a whole bunch of different settlements that have been paid by the various opioid manufacturers and distributors in these countries as they have not let these things come to the end of the case. They’ve not let those things come to a verdict."
"But in this case, it’s a judge’s ruling and if this $572 million order stands up to appeal, this could be the first very big step toward pharmaceutical companies really, finally being put on their back foot, really, finally being put on the defensive over what they have done to the country with the purposeful overprescribing of these drugs," she concluded.
Watch:
