Editor’s note: Big Tent Ideas always aims to provide balancing perspectives on the hottest issues of the day. Below is a column from lawyer Steve Milloy, where he argues that glyphosate is an essential herbicide in global agriculture and challenges scientific studies suggesting it to be cancer-causing. You can find a counterpoint here, where Farm Action Co-Founder Angela Huffman argues against legal immunity for companies that produce pesticides and highlights health risks that have been linked to the herbicide.
(DCNF)—The weed killer Roundup was recently at the Supreme Court, pitting trial lawyers against Bayer, the manufacturer of the widely used herbicide. The issue was whether congressionally mandated federal regulation of a pesticide pre-empts holding a company liable under state law for failure to warn about cancer risk.
The case puts the cart before the horse. What exactly is the cancer risk?
Used since the mid-1970s, Roundup, and its active ingredient glyphosate, has become the most widely used herbicide globally and domestically. While it is commonly used in residential and commercial settings to control weeds, the vast majority of Roundup is used to grow row crops like corn, soybeans and cotton.
Radical green groups began opposing Roundup in the 1990s as part of their campaign against genetical engineered (GMO) crops. So-called “Roundup Ready” crops were engineered to withstand the application of Roundup to crops, thereby increasing crop yields.
Though the campaign against GMOs largely failed, the radical green groups kept attacking Roundup, even though it had passed scrutiny by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under seven presidential administrations, Republican and Democrat.
That’s an impressive feat as EPA staff is known for being anti-pesticide and, in my experience, has no compunction about changing the rules to ban pesticides that become politically incorrect, which Roundup certainly has.
The greens had success in getting Roundup in the crosshairs of the United Nations’ International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC, pronounced “eye-ark”). In 2015, IARC concluded that Roundup’s key ingredient, glyphosate, was “probably carcinogenic.” No other regulatory body in the world before or since has made that determination.
Trial lawyers latched on the IARC ruling and began filing and winning, at first, multi-hundred-million dollar jury verdicts against Monsanto (the original manufacturer of Roundup) and, later, multi-billion-dollar jury verdicts against Monsanto and then Bayer, after Bayer bought Monsanto.
But investigators soon discovered that the IARC process had been rigged to exclude evidence favorable to glyphosate safety. One of IARC consultants was actually working on behalf of trial lawyers getting ready to sue Monsanto.
Nevertheless, the lawsuits and mind-boggling jury awards have continued and now the Supreme Court has been called to decide whether they are constitutional. A decision will likely come by the end of the Court’s term. But the question remains, does glyphosate cause cancer?
If it does, the anti-pesticide staff of the U.S. EPA has never been able to show it. And if the agency staff could have, it certainly would have.
My own review of the human and animal studies on glyphosate literature is that the best conducted human studies find no statistical association between glyphosate use and cancer incidence. The few that report an association are poor quality, biased and their results could easily be attributed to chance and methodological flaws.
There are no persuasive animal studies linking even extraordinary doses of glyphosate with cancer incidence.
All this is qualified by the reality that no human study, positive or negative, has actually includes measured exposures to glyphosate. No animal study is demonstrably biologically relevant to humans. Lab rats and mice are not little people, after all.
The bottom line is that Roundup and glyphosate have demonstrable value to society but cause no demonstrable harm, despite decades of the best efforts of its opponents.
While activist groups and trial lawyers are easy to blame for the threat posed to this safe and invaluable chemical, I lay the blame for this situation at the feet of the chemical industry. Decades ago, the chemical industry stopped vigorous factual defense in the media of its products in favor of feel-good messaging.
It’s easy to scare people about things they don’t understand, like pesticides. But the industry’s ongoing failure to defend its own products, especially in the face of aggressive attackers, is inexcusable.
Steve Milloy is a biostatistician and lawyer. He posts on X at @JunkScience.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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