Roundup Hysteria
Misinformation about one of the safest herbicides ever produced has created a lucrative business for ambulance-chasing lawyers and NGOs—at the expense of native species.
Oct 14, 20199:00
You’ve seen the ads flooding television and social media:
“Have you been exposed to weed killer Roundup? If you have cancer, you
may be eligible for compensation. Call our law offices … ”
In 2018 and 2019, California juries ordered Roundup’s
producer, Monsanto, to pay multimillion-dollar compensations to four
non-Hodgkin lymphoma patients who claimed to have been sickened by
Roundup (one of dozens of formulations with herbicide glyphosate as the
active ingredient). As a result, there are now close to 20,000 lawsuits
against the company from people who also allege that exposure to Roundup
gave them cancer.
The California verdicts will almost certainly be overturned on
appeal because they were based on the alleged failings of Monsanto, not
on any scientific evidence that Roundup causes cancer. Follow-up suits
that aren’t settled are likely to fail, too.
All scientific bodies that have seriously studied glyphosate
report no link to cancer. These include the World Health Organization.
But WHO’s loosely connected appendage—the International Agency for
Research on Cancer—postulates a “probable” link. Instead of studying
glyphosate, it reviewed existing studies of the herbicide. Based on this 2015 review, IARC placed glyphosate on its “2A List” of substances with “limited
evidence of carcinogenicity in humans and sufficient evidence of
carcinogenicity in experimental animals” or, in IARC’s abbreviated
translation, “probably carcinogenic.” That list also includes “very hot beverages” and “red meat.”
Lee Van Wychen, executive director of science policy for the
National and Regional Weed Science Societies, offers this: “IARC’s
review was such a crooked scam! I’ve never seen anything like it. … IARC
cherry-picked a couple studies and on top of that fudged the results of
those studies. They did these odds-ratio calculations—a correlation,
not even a mechanistic cause—of how glyphosate might cause cancer. Now there are people on the conservation side who are afraid to use glyphosate.”
Van Wychen assesses the studies IARC reviewed that supposedly
indicate “sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in experimental
animals” as follows: “They dosed rats with glyphosate to the point they
couldn’t even stand up straight.” On Oct. 19, 2017, Reuters reported
that IARC “dismissed and edited findings from a draft of its review of
the weed killer glyphosate that were at odds with its final conclusion.”
The California verdicts, the lawyer feeding frenzy, and Roundup hysteria all issued from IARC’s speculation.
The week IARC published its minority opinion the review’s
leader, Christopher Portier, signed on as a litigation consultant for
counsel suing Monsanto on behalf of alleged glyphosate cancer victims.
He reportedly received $450 per hour.
California responded to the IARC review by ordering that all
glyphosate products carry a cancer warning. On Feb. 26, 2018, a federal
judge struck down the requirement, ruling it “inherently misleading … when apparently all other regulatory and governmental bodies have found the opposite.”
When I inform people that glyphosate doesn’t cause cancer, I
tend to get responses like: “OK, drink a glass.” I could, with impunity.
It’s a plant poison that passes harmlessly through human digestive
tracts. “LD50” stands for the lethal dose that kills half the test
animals when given to them in doses per unit of body mass. Higher is
safer. For rats, caffeine’s LD50 is 192 mg/kg. Glyphosate’s is 5,600 mg/kg.
Yet, some environmental groups are calling for a total ban on
glyphosate, and many are recycling the untruth that it’s carcinogenic.
These include the Environmental Working Group, Center for Biological Diversity, Natural Resources Defense Council, EcoWatch, Greenpeace, U.S. Public Interest Research Group, Sierra Club, and Friends of the Earth.
