Lawsuits have been filed against the makers of chemical hair relaxers after decades’ worth of studies have shown that the chemicals in these products can cause cancers and other serious health problems in women. But, as usual, the industry covered up these dangers for decades so they could continue to cash in. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: Lawsuits have been filed against the makers of chemical hair relaxers after decades worth of studies have shown that the chemicals in these products can cause cancer and other very serious health problems in women. But as usual, the industry covered up these dangers for decades. So they continue to make cash. The corporate media continues not to talk. Did you catch that in the story?
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Why is corporate media been not out at front of this? Because of the companies that are involved, the companies advertising with their nightly news.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. L’Oreal, one of the biggest ones here.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. But that’s so typical, isn’t it?
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: We can’t tell this story and I say this all the time because I used to do MSNBC with Ed Schultz, and we’d be in the close count, it was insane. We’d be in a close count and the tickle would be coming up, Mike Papantonio, Ed Schultz talk about Bayer product that’s killing women, in between the tickle and the time I’m supposed to go on and talk about Bayer, we get a call all over the ear, Mike, we gotta change your story. We’re gonna talk about constitutional law. Why? Because the company has called MSNBC and said, by God, if you do that, we’re gonna cut back your advertising. Same thing here. Corporate media is dead, dysfunctional and died. I mean, they’ve died where it comes to taking care of consumer issues like this.
Farron Cousins: Right. And it’s only after we get to the point where they have no choice but to cover it, which is exactly what’s happened with the New York Times here. And to their credit, this is a great story. I’ve actually covered.
Mike Papantonio: No, it is. But look, this has been around for 15 years, man.
Farron Cousins: It’s going back to, what was it, 1990. They suspected it in 1995, the researchers. So they spent two years in 1997, they finally came out and said, we just spent two years looking at it. These chemical hair relaxers that are marketed to black women across the country, they’re causing early onset puberty. They’re causing uterine cancer, breast cancer, bladder cancer, all these horrible cancers. And it’s because of these chemicals in this product. So these scientists didn’t stop there. For the next 20 years they did more studies. It was like 43,000, more than 43,000 women they examined and they concluded after study, after study, after study, these chemical hair relaxers are killing these women.
Mike Papantonio: Okay. You hit it on the head. Okay. You’re roundup of that is exactly right. You know, we’re handling these cases. And you go back and look at the documents, they’ve known forever. There’s been small studies out there that have shown forever that, yeah, you know what? Formaldehyde is bad to put on somebody’s head because it leeches to the brain. It becomes systemic in the body. Really? They knew that 20 years ago. Okay. People were looking at this 20 years ago, 15, 20 years ago, there were studies that said this might be a problem. But until the sister study came out, which is an important study, the sister study is an incredibly important study because it makes comparisons. It says two people that grew up together, they used this product. This person didn’t use this. What are the differences there? Are there DNA issues? No, there’s something that’s external. The sister study is extremely important. But the point is, corporate media knew about this a long time. And there were many efforts on our people like us that said, you gotta cover this story. And you know who would cover it? It would be the outliers. It would be social media. It would be small organizations, maybe like The Lever or organizations that we go to for real news.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: But I don’t know why we don’t hold corporate media responsible for this kind of stuff. We saw it with opioids. Right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: We saw it with PFAS. Right. I’ve seen it with about 80 pharmaceutical companies where we believe that the corporate media is there for us and they’re not.
Farron Cousins: Well, there’s also, if I can find it here, something that’s also very interesting to me is the fact that we don’t have this happening in Europe.
Mike Papantonio: No.
Farron Cousins: They have chemical hair relaxers.
Mike Papantonio: Explain why.
Farron Cousins: But here it is. In Europe, the European Union regulates more than 1,300 ingredients for use in cosmetics. Here in the USA, the FDA prohibits or restricts only nine. So most of these chemicals in these hair relaxers in the United States causing these cancers and these other endocrine system problems, they don’t exist in Europe because Europe says, no, we know these will kill people. You can’t use ’em in cosmetics. And the cosmetics companies say, okay, we can actually do it without them. We’re just choosing to not do it in the US because it’s slightly more expensive.
Mike Papantonio: Yes, it’s more expensive. We can make more profit. As a matter of fact, something like 80% of the toxins that are in these hair relaxers, that any basic chemist could look at and say, this is bad. This is bad. 84%, something like 84% aren’t even on the label. They’ve been saying, we’re gonna hold it secret because it’s a fiduciary, it’s an interest, a financial interest to us to hold this a secret. But, we’ll never solve this problem. The thousands of women, you ought to hear the cases, uterine cancer, breast cancer. And this was targeted primarily to African American women. Right. Because we created this aura that you have to have straight hair. And even leaders played into that. Oprah played into it. Whoopi Goldberg played into it. Michelle Obama. All people that are kind of, people look at and they say, this is leadership. Let me see what they’re doing. And they’re just part of the same old story and this just perpetuated itself and thousands of people dying because of it.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And there was a time in my lifetime and your lifetime as well, where this is the stuff the media would cover. This is what 60 Minutes would tell you about on a Sunday evening. Instead, now they want to do these puff pieces with politicians. They don’t want to talk about the dangerous products. The faulty products that you buy. The undercover investigation. Remember in the eighties, we had so many undercover investigations of the auto mechanics ripping people off.
Mike Papantonio: Of course.
Farron Cousins: They don’t do that anymore.
Mike Papantonio: Do you have any idea, you know, we launched the tobacco litigation, do you have any idea, they made a movie over how difficult it was for us to even get the media to pay attention to tobacco. You know why? Because the advertising dollars were tremendous. And so they ignored it. And we think we can turn on the news and know, okay, we’re gonna be told what might kill us, what might kill our children, what we should eat, what we shouldn’t eat. We think we’re covered. We’re anything but covered, Farron. It’s outrageous the lack of sunlight that the media puts on stories like this. Black women have been at risk for decades now, unnecessarily, and we owe it to the fact we got a media that doesn’t give a because dollars is all that matters. And an FDA, that doesn’t give a because that guy that’s making the decision with the FDA is looking for a job with L’Oreal or one of the other companies.
