Brent Wisner is the youngest lawyer in history to ever win a multi-billion dollar verdict, and he s also one of the most successful trial lawyers in the country. In this episode, Brent talks about the controversial case of the Zantac case against Monsanto, and why he thinks there s something in the pill that could be causing cancer in humans. This is a show that you ll need to watch, and particularly if you ve taken Xantax for a long time and then you got cancer, and we re going to talk about what kind of cancer that is, you need to know the subject of today s podcast. For all of you who have heartburn or reflux from the current political situation in our world, and are tempted to take Zantax, or have taken it in the past, this episode is a must-listen, especially if you've taken it for a while and then got cancer. Brent Wisner, who is my friend, won every award that you can possibly win for litigation, and during the Monsanto litigation, when I was on the trial team, I watched him as lead counsel to the opening and closing arguments and did all of the depositions and cross-examinations. He s also, you know, the best lawyer in the U.S. and I'm very happy to claim him as a friend. He's won a ton of awards, including the Clarence Arrow Award, the Consumer Attorneys of California, MVP of the Year, and the National Trial Lawyers Association. And can you tell what those are? He won a bunch of other awards, too! And he's also won a Nobel Prize for his work on the Monsanto case, too. And I hope you take my word for it. . Thank you for listening, Brent and I can t wait to see what you think of this episode in a future episode of Law 360. I'll see you next week! . . . - Tom Bell Tom Bell is a writer, editor, and editor-in- in-chief of the New York Times bestselling book, The Testaments. and the author of the new book, The Testimony of a man who s got it all. The Truth About It All. by Tom Bell, is out now! and he's a good friend of mine, too, and I think you should listen to this episode.
00:00:00.000Hey everybody, we're going to talk about Zantac today for all of you who have heartburn or reflux from the current political situation in our world and are tempted to take Zantac or have taken it in the past.
00:00:14.000This is a show that you'll need to watch.
00:00:18.000And particularly if you've taken Xantax for a long time and then you got cancer and we're going to talk about what kind of cancer that is, you need to know the subject of today's podcast.
00:00:30.000Brent Wisner, who's my friend, I'm very happy to claim him as a friend.
00:00:35.000He's also, you know, a lot of people tell you, I know the best lawyer in the country.
00:00:40.000Well, Brent Wisner actually, arguably, is the best lawyer in the country.
00:00:47.000He's won every award that you can possibly win for litigation.
00:00:53.000And during the Monsanto litigation, when I was on the trial team, I watched him as lead counsel to the opening and closing arguments and do these extraordinary direct and cross-examinations.
00:01:07.000He did every aspect of the litigation.
00:01:13.000He is a versatile lawyer, and he's an extraordinary performer.
00:01:19.000He has a chemical link to jurors like I've never seen before, and he is the youngest lawyer in history to ever win a multi-billion dollar verdict.
00:01:32.000He has been declared the titan of the plaintiff's bar by Law 360.
00:01:40.000He's been declared an elite trial lawyer by the American Trial Lawyers Association and won a ton of other...
00:01:49.000I can't even read all of these awards he's won without using up time that I wanted.
00:01:56.000How about the Clarence Arrow Award, American Lawyer Award of Maternity of the Year by the Consumer Attorneys of California, MVP of the Year by Product Liability and National Law Journal.
00:02:09.000The Civil Plaintiff's Trial Lawyer of the Year and winning litigators, Titan of Industry by the National Trial Lawyers, America's 50 Most Influential Trial Lawyers, and on and on.
00:02:24.000He is an incredible attorney and I wanted to talk today about the Zantac cases because Zantac was a drug that I took for a little while.
00:02:36.000It's over-the-counter medication for heartburn, for reflux.
00:02:40.000It's one of the most popular medicines before it was called by FDA. I think it's back on the shelves now in a different form, right?
00:02:49.000They took out the bad product, the chemical that was causing the problem.
00:02:53.000So there's a chemical called remitidine in Zantac that has a byproduct if it stays on the shelf for a significant amount of time that is extremely Extremely carcinogenic.
00:03:07.000Is that a good summary of kind of what it is?
00:03:12.000So basically there's something called, there's a nitroso, the reninity molecule on one half of it has a nitroso molecule.
00:03:23.000And at the other end of it has a DMA molecule.
00:03:27.000And because, you know, the way physics and chemistry, they sometimes reach around and they reconnect as NDMA. An NDMA is a very, very potent human carcinogen discovered in the 30s in the development of rocket fuel.
00:03:43.000And it literally has no purpose in our world except for the fact that it causes cancer.
00:03:48.000It's actually used in laboratory experiments to induce cancer in animals.
00:03:53.000And so it's forming at levels that are It's staggering.
00:03:58.000So like we're talking about the daily safe limit is 96 nanograms and what they're finding in one pill, and this is just in the pill, before it does anything in your body, just in the pill, you know, thousands of nanograms.
00:04:12.000And so it's probably something that has caused an innumerable number of people's cancers because it was such a widely used product.
00:04:21.000So in litigation like this, you have to identify specific kinds of cancer that are subject to the litigation.
00:04:35.000I think a way of thinking about it is NDMA, right, if you expose it to any tissue in any sufficient amount, it will cause cancer.
00:04:45.000It doesn't matter if it's your eyeball, your chin, or your prostate, or whatever, right?
00:04:51.000And that's just a function of the way NDMA interacts with human DNA. It actually causes it to effectively, causes it to miscode pretty consistently.
00:05:02.000And so technically, it could cause any cancer.
00:05:06.000But what we're focusing on, right, are what we can tell from the literature that it's very clear that we can show that it causes that cancer.
00:05:14.000And that's an important distinction because a lot of people's cancer, it may very well have caused But we're not really in a place yet scientifically to say we have enough data, particularly rare cancers, you know, where it's hard to get enough data to study it.
00:05:26.000But for here, I mean, we're focusing really on five, six, seven, eight main cancers.
00:05:32.000The big ones are bladder cancer, Liver cancer, stomach cancer.
00:05:39.000We're focusing on colorectal cancer, prostate cancer, breast cancer.
00:05:43.000And then there's some other ones, pancreatic cancer, esophageal cancer.
00:05:47.000And these are all cancers that there is some substantial amount of literature showing not only that NDMA can cause it, but that ranitidine itself is associated with it.
00:05:58.000It's a complex scientific inquiry, but We think that we have the science to really push those cancers forward, and we're litigating them actively right now in our proceeding in California, which is exciting.
00:06:10.000And you are still inviting plaintiffs into the litigation, right?
00:06:15.000There's still an opportunity if people who are listening to this podcast or people who are friends or family of those who are listening to this podcast have any of those kind of cancers and can show that they took Zantac for a period of time, they have an opportunity to call Baum-Hedlund and to become part of this litigation.
00:06:40.000I mean, we have a whole team of people who've educated on the science and ask a bunch of questions to make sure that, you know, there isn't some other issue that could be a problem for their case.
00:06:50.000And then we sign them up and put them into our family.
00:06:56.000These things take many years and involve many, many thousands and thousands of people.
00:07:00.000But, you know, we have a good track record of Taking care of our clients like we did in the Roundup Litigation and we're planning to do the same here.
00:07:10.000And by all means, if you or a loved one or somebody has cancer, one of these cancers, and are worried that Zantac may have caused it or played a role in it, Call us immediately or get in touch with us immediately.
00:07:22.000There's some legal defenses that can come up if you don't take action right away.
00:07:26.000So absolutely, the case is still very much alive and we're still taking in clients.
00:07:31.000And it still surprises me how many people to this day don't know about this.
00:07:35.000And part of the problem, Bobby, as you pointed out, is that Zantac came back on the market a few months ago.
00:07:41.000But it came back on the market with no ranidity, right?
00:08:58.000GSK, GlaxoSmithKline, or I think it was GlaxoWelcome at the time, but, you know, they're the ones who invented the molecule, the rinidine molecule, and started this whole, really, epidemic of cancer that they've created by this product.
00:09:13.000And how long do people, in order to be a plaintiff in this kind of litigation, how long should you have taken Zantac and what kind of proof do you have to show?
00:09:25.000Because most people who take Zantac are not keeping their receipts.
00:09:50.000I mean, it's really about cumulative exposure because every single time you took a Zantac pill, The NDMA in that pill and the NDMA that formed in your body from the pill, from the processes inside the gut, Had a chance to cause the mutation that would ultimately become cancer, right?
00:10:09.000So, you know, you can get those cancers in a relatively short period of time, but typically, you know, to be that unlucky, it has to happen, you know, over a period of many years.
00:10:19.000But the rough estimate is, you know, we're looking for people who took a substantial amount either every day for at least a year or, you know, more sporadically, but for a longer period of time.
00:10:31.000And you are taking clients in California and every other state.
00:10:38.000We represent clients where they live, and we have either agreements, but for the most part, we're finding places to file their cases in jurisdictions and venues that is the best for them, right?
00:10:50.000Sometimes being in your home jurisdiction isn't necessarily the best.
00:10:53.000If you're in a very conservative jurisdiction, at least judicially conservative jurisdiction, you might not want to file your case there, right?
00:11:01.000And so we try to find a way to put your case into a place that has a better jury pool, for example.
00:11:06.000But, you know, I think this case, for what it's worth, I'm not so worried about juries.
00:11:34.000And if you people take this every day, some people took it two to three times a day.
00:11:39.000I mean, and then of course they get these cancers and these cancers keep coming back and they're taking Zantac every day.
00:11:46.000And I don't know why their cancer just keeps coming back like with a vengeance because they're literally poisoning themselves because these manufacturers, you know, hid this issue And it's an incredibly painful litigation in the sense that I have thousands of clients now who Are telling me their stories, and it's just devastating to hear what they've gone through.
00:12:09.000They could have taken literally any other antacid, didn't have this problem.
00:12:13.000You know, Tums, Pepsid, even some of the more scary PPIs, those don't have this issue.
00:12:20.000And it's just sort of a shame that GSK and then the rest of the people who took over the product over the years, you know, just wanted to make billions of dollars at the expense of people's health.
00:12:41.000A lot of them are unfortunately still confidential, so I can't really get into it too much, but I will say Early on in the lifespan of the product, there were some researchers out of Italy who were testing ranitidine, and they were actually doing it in a simulated gastric fluid.
00:13:01.000They took human gastric fluid, and they put in some other stuff, and they put in ranitidine and some sodium nitrite, stuff you might find in cured meats and things of that sort.
00:13:11.000And then they kind of let it, you know, react, and then they would see, is that reaction, is what's happening in the stomach, is that stuff a mutagen?
00:13:20.000Is it mutagenic, or is it causing mutations in bacteria and whatnot?
00:13:24.000And they showed that it was highly mutagenic, that it was highly genotoxic.
00:13:30.000And, you know, they published their results, and GSK, you know, Responds publicly to these results and says, oh, this is not biologically feasible.
00:13:43.000And if you look at the actual FDA documents back in the 80s, you know, they discussed this study and they're like, and GSK goes, well, don't worry.
00:13:52.000This is only indicated for short term use.
00:13:55.000So while there might be this risk with NDMA, it would just be a short, short, short risk.
00:14:00.000And then additionally, it was like, you know, the Italian author's recommendation was you shouldn't take this with food because food, it interacts with stuff and food and that's problematic.
00:14:13.000One, GSK immediately started marketing it for daily use and many, many, many people took it for years, not for 10 days or whatever.
00:14:20.000And then, of course, they started marketing it specifically with food.
00:14:24.000I mean, I have commercials that I have found where they literally are like a guy comes to the door with a pizza box and a Zantac box on top.
00:15:08.000I was shocked when FDA pulled Zantac because usually, you know, these companies have completely captured and disabled the regulatory agency.
00:15:20.000Why did regulation actually work at that point?
00:16:01.000They got the results and said off the market immediately.
00:16:04.000And that's a reflection of the Canadian regulators, at least in this specific instance, not in every instance, but in this specific instance, you know, acting quickly.
00:16:13.000Grant, if we have listeners who need to get a hold of you on this case, how do they do it?
00:16:18.000The best thing to do is to call my firm, BaumHedlund.
00:16:39.000Our number is 855- Just give us a call and you'll get straight to an intake specialist who will be able to talk to you and get to the bottom of it.
00:16:50.000And of course, if at any point you feel like you need to speak to me or a specific attorney, we always make time to talk to people.
00:16:58.000Taking care of our clients is actually the only really good part of our job is getting to know people and their stories.