Monsanto, Roundup, cancer from pesticides, and lawsuits are discussed in this episode with investigative journalist Carey Gillam. Carey talks about her new book, the historic trial that first proved Roundup causes cancer, and the dangers that pervasive pesticide use bring to all of us.
Please read Carey Gillam's new book: The Monsanto Papers available here: https://smile.amazon.com/Monsanto-Papers-Secrets-Corporate-Corruption/dp/1642830569/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=monsanto+papers&qid=1623358381&sr=8-4
Carey Gillam can be found on:
Twitter: @CareyGillam
Facebook: Carey Gillam - Author
Instagram: @TruthAboutPesticides
I have an old friend of mine on today, and I'm really excited about her.
Investigative journalist Carrie Gillum has spent 25 years researching the food and agricultural and agrochemical industry, spending most of her career with the international news agency Reuters.
She is now emerging as a modern-day Rachel Carson with two books that reveal decades of corporate secrets and deceptive tactics.
My powerful pesticide companies, including the global giant Monsanto.
Her books and her ongoing reporting and her writing have led her to become recognized as an international expert on corporate control of agriculture and the health and environmental impacts of a pesticide-dependent food system.
She was asked to testify before the European Parliament in 2017 She has been an invited speaker at the World Forum for Democracy in Strasbourg, France.
She's keynoted events all over the country, all over many countries, on almost all of the continents.
Gilliam's 2017 book, Whitewash, the Story of the Weed Killer Cancer and the Corruption of Science, won the 2018 Rachel Carson Book Award and the Gold Medal for Outstanding Work from the Independent Book Publishers and many other awards.
Her second book, which we were going to talk about today, we're going to talk about both of them, was released on March 2nd of this year, and it's called The Monsanto Papers, Deadly Secrets, Corporate Corruption and One Man's Search for Justice.
And it has been described by a reviewer as blending, quote, science and human tragedy with courtroom drama and the style of John Grisham.
That book is about the Monsanto trial, in which I was privileged to be part of the trial team in that trial, and I spent a lot of time with Kerry in San Francisco and Oakland, and particularly with Lee Johnson's trial.
You know, let's go right into the government industry corruption and what You know, we were able to get with the Monsanto papers where we really got a glimpse of what was happening, of this extraordinarily corrupt relationship between particularly the EPA Pesticide Division.
And it turns out that the head of that division, Jess Rowland, was actually for many years just representing Monsanto's Interest, the inside of that agency.
Let's talk about that.
Let's start by talking about Jess Rowland and all the things that you talk about in your book.
Oh my gosh, yeah.
Jess Rowland, right?
My first book, when people ask me about the differences between my first and second book, in some ways there aren't many, in other ways they're incredibly different.
But the first book was really about the deception that Monsanto engaged in, deceiving Regulators, the EPA, as well as consumers and scientists and everyone really that they were trying to promote this product to.
But it also was about deceptive tactics taken by the regulatory agencies and in many cases by scientists and people in the scientific community.
Jess Rowland, as you point out, it's hard to really know because we haven't been able to talk to Jess and the depositions that he was involved in don't seem to have revealed very much.
But what we see in the internal documents that have come out from the EPA and what came out through litigation is Both through Freedom of Information Act requests and through discovery requests, was that Monsanto thought that this gentleman, Jess Rowland, who was leading the cancer review assessment within the Office of Pesticide Programs at the EPA, was considered a very close friend of Monsanto's.
And they talk in numerous emails about how he can be helpful to them and he can help them with their defense of glyphosate.
There are emails where they're talking about just helping them, wanting to help them kill a review of glyphosate safety by a different agency, not the EPA, but a different federal agency.
And an email where a Monsanto executive says, you know, just told me if I can kill this, I should get a medal.
And ultimately, the EPA was successful in at least delaying this review by this outside agency.
But there are many, many, you know, as I detailed in my first book, going back to the 1980s, there are emails and communications buried in the archives of the EPA, that I guess are not buried anymore, that show that the agency was working very hard to put Monsanto's interests above the interests of public health.
During two of the trials, and we're not allowed to use that memo, but one of the trials that actually allowed us to use it, and I think it It's one of the reasons why we got $2 billion judgment from the jury, because they understood that Monsanto is not just lying to the public about the health effects of Glyphus,
it was also knowingly and purposely subverting democracy and destroying the careers of scientists who tried to tell the truth.
They were gross writing scientific publications And then paying prominent scientists to sign those publications.
And we got all of those emails.
Yeah, definitely.
I mean, as I said, there's a long history of this.
The information that came out just even before Discovery, in my first book, Whitewash, this was before the first trial, before a lot of these Discovery documents came out.
And these were just based on what I was able to get through Freedom of Information.
And it laid a clear path That from the 1980s, Monsanto had a lot of control and influence With the EPA and other regulatory agencies, the FDA, the USDA, as well as European regulatory agencies.
And I don't think Monsanto is unique necessarily in that respect.
You see that play out with the different companies, Dow, for instance, and DuPont and other very powerful and influential companies that have a lot of money to throw around in D.C., I'm sure you've experienced that in many different areas that you've looked into as well.
It's very hard for anyone really to challenge these companies and the record certainly does not show that EPA put up much of an effort to delve into The true safety profile of these products.
I mean, one thing we learned, a lot of people, I guess, in the scientific community understood this, but the rest of us really got to understand that the EPA doesn't even require any independent long-term carcinogenicity testing of the Roundup products or these products that are out on the market.
So formulated Roundup or Ranger Pro or these other chemicals that you might be picking up To use around your lawn and garden are being used on golf courses and school playgrounds.
The EPA doesn't require testing on those actual products for cancer risk or other human health hazards.
They look at the active ingredient, glyphosate, they require Monsanto or other registrants to submit an array of scientific studies that delve into the safety of this active ingredient, but they don't for the formulated product.
Which contains other ingredients.
And what scientists have found over the years is that these formulations can be quite a bit more dangerous, much more toxic, because there's an enhanced synergistic effect when you mix these with other things, these surfactants and other chemicals.
And this has been a big problem with Roundup.
And the EPA still, to this day, doesn't require these long-term tests on these formulated products.
That was one of the issues that we tried to get in front of the jury, and I think we did that successfully because, as you say, the EPA had a bunch of tests that looked at glyphosate alone, but Monsanto doesn't sell glyphosate alone.
It sells it blended with a lot of other chemicals, including, as you point out, surfactants.
The purpose of the surfactant is to help a chemical Infiltrate and permeate the plants, but it has the same impact on human beings.
So if you get the formulated product, the Roundup, it has the surfactant, which is escorting essentially the chemical glyphosate through your skin and into your system, and that's its purpose.
And it's far more dangerous with that surfactant than it is alone, but the EPA allows the company Just test the glyphosate, the active ingredient, without actually testing what Roundup does to people.
And the few tests where people have tested Roundup show that it's far more toxic in the formulation than it is when glyphosate is alone.
Yeah, definitely.
And in fact, in Europe, the surfactant that Monsanto was using for many, many years, the POEA surfactant was banned in Europe because it was found to be so dangerous.
Now, Monsanto, you know, we even have emails where Monsanto is talking about this ban, this upcoming ban on the surfactant.
Wanting to spin that, wanting to make sure people don't see that because of a human health hazard, but because of other reasons.
There's so much information that's come out over the years.
And I wrote the second book because while the first one focused on the whitewash or the cover-up basically of the science, it was both a cover-up of science that showed harm and a perpetration of deception in the scientific community, putting out these ghost-written studies, like you mentioned.
And employing these front groups and this whole array of tactics to try to convince the world that this product not only is safer than any other herbicide that you could use, but was safe enough to be It's put directly on food crops.
And that was a huge thing, but we should go back to that in a minute.
But I want to say my second book, this book about the Johnson trial, I really wanted to write that because that's about the impact, right?
Or the consequences of the deception.
And Lee is only one man suffering from cancer, but there are so many, you know, millions of people suffering from cancer, over 600,000 people, right?
Every year die from cancer just in the United States.
And approximately 40% of men and women in the United States are expected to get cancer in their lifetimes, according to the National Cancer Institute.
It's just unbelievable that we are being told that we need to accept and live, learn to live with cancer and And get different treatments and have our body parts cut off and get radiated when we know that pesticides and chemicals and environmental toxins are big contributors to cancer.
And so I wanted to tell the story of Lee Johnson and what happens when you have a company as powerful as Monsanto that is perpetrating this fraud upon the public that this product is so safe that you can use it everywhere.
It can become ubiquitous in our air and our water and our food and found in our own urine and our blood serums.
We can spray it around school playgrounds.
We can spray it directly on our food and everything will be just fine because everything isn't just fine.
And so that's what I'm hoping to show readers in this book, The Monsanto Papers, is the story of Lee Johnson, who you got to know, and his struggle to survive cancer, but also to hold Monsanto accountable.
So it's a different kind of book and a different kind of story, but I'm hoping it's more personal, I suppose.
People often pay more attention, you know, if it's a personal story.
I'm so glad that you wrote this book about Lee Johnson, because that was really one of the pieces of, I won't say dumb luck, because there was consideration.
Because at that time, when we started the trial, there was about 14,000 clients.
We had to figure out which one to push to the front of the line.
And there were many reasons to push Lee, because his situation was so dire.
But he just turned out to be an incredible witness and a very, very sympathetic plaintiff for the jury.
Yeah, Lee's story really does tug at the heart.
He was brought to the forefront of the litigation and became the first person to go to trial against Monsanto because his doctor said, you know, it looks like you have 18 months left to live.
And this helped get him a preference trial granted by the judge in the case.
But, you know, Lee's father, two young boys, and when he grew up, he didn't have his father in his life, and he struggled quite a bit as a young man.
But in his midlife, then he was doing really well and really enjoyed his job as a school groundskeeper and was making good money and taking care of his wife and his two kids and Really, I was struck getting to know him and his devotion to really trying to be there and be present and be involved and be a good dad to these boys.
So, you know, being told that he was going to die before they were, you know, even in their teens, before they were grown, really was just heartbreaking for him.
And I've gotten to know him quite a bit and putting this story together and telling his story in the book and He's a remarkable man.
He just essentially decided, not only was he going to take on Monsanto and beat him, but with the help of a few really talented attorneys, but he wasn't going to die, is what he's told me a few times.
And he is still out there kicking around, even though he's suffering incredibly and still trying to seek treatment.
But so far, he's beaten that diagnosis and beaten the odds.
Talk about his relationship with his wife, because that was...
The two of them are so adorable together.
Yeah, Araceli is just a really amazing woman, too.
She's a little bit younger, quite a bit younger, I suppose, than Lee.
He's just the love of her life, and the thought of losing him has been incredibly painful for her.
And they actually fell in love at first sight.
They saw each other in a classroom at community college, and he knew at that moment that he was going to try to marry her.
Yeah, yeah.
That's how they describe it.
She took one look at him and, you know, that was it for her, I guess.
And he, as I said, he was a little bit older and he already had a child before with another woman, but really, you know, wasn't, had never been married before.
And Araceli was the one for him.
But they've struggled, you know, especially with his cancer and disease.
He's a really proud man and the loss of his income, the loss of his physical abilities, being so sick has really put a strain on their marriage as well.
It's hard to see, you know, up close and personal how cancer ravages not only the individual, but also the family.
And that's what you see in the story of the Johnson case.
He won his case against Monsanto and the jury unanimously Decided not only that Monsanto was to blame, but indeed their glyphosate-based herbicides caused his cancer, but that he was due $250 million in punitive damages because of the extent and the egregiousness of Monsanto's conduct in hiding the risks.
But because of some really interesting, I guess, aspects of California law, that judgment was cut significantly to $20.5 million ultimately.
Talk a little bit about the lawyers, about my amazing partners in this case, particularly kind of serendipity about what happened to Mike Miller at the beginning of the case.
Yeah, I mean, this story, again, watching it all come together, I knew I had to write a book about it because it was just like watching a movie kind of unfold, right?
You know, you had Lee Johnson, this very interesting, you know, sympathetic character suffering this really horrible type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma that manifests on the skin.
So his tumors and his pain and his suffering is all seen on his face and his arms and his legs.
It's just, it's brutal.
His body was literally covered with these postulating lesions.
And as you said, he's a very proud man.
He loves swimming.
He stopped swimming because he was concerned that other people wouldn't want to go in a swimming pool after he'd been in it.
He said he felt sorry for his wife having to sleep in the same bed with him.
Just an incredibly brave, brave man who never complained about anything.
Yeah.
I visited him in his home multiple times and traveling.
And when he gets up from bed, you know, there's blood on the sheets and on the pillow where the wounds, the open lesions, the cancerous sores on his, on his head and his body have opened up and bled at night.
He can barely have anything touch his skin because it just, it falls away at the slightest touch.
He showed me a lesion on his foot at one point.
And I, I just, I cried.
I couldn't believe a person could be alive, and I was looking at a hole in his foot that went down to the bone.
It's been an unbelievable situation that he's been dealing with.
In terms of the lawyers, yeah, I mean, the first lawyer that he connected with, or the first firm, was the Miller Firm out of Virginia, a really aggressive plaintiff's firm.
But they had never taken on a pesticide company.
And this is Mike Miller, and he's an old Southern guy, and he's kind of gruff, and he's got a real Southern charm about him, but he's also, you know, takes no prisoners.
And, you know, once he decided to take on Monsanto, he decided he was going to win, and he put millions of his own money, dollars, and the firm's money really into This case and building it over years through discovery and expert witnesses and research.
So you had Mike, and he looked forward to bringing this case to trial.
But just the trial was supposed to start in June, and he wanted to take his boys, his own family, on a Memorial Day weekend getaway.
And they went to the coast, and he was going to go kiteboarding, kite surfing, which is what he loves to do.
I'd take the address.
Yeah, and had this just terrible accident where the rigging on his gear malfunctioned and he slammed into the pier at a high rate of speed.
And, you know, it was a miracle that he survived.
He had so many broken bones and collapsed lungs and, you know, was just really beat up that they rushed him to the hospital.
And he was in there saying, still saying he was going to, he was going to take this case to trial.
And of course he couldn't.
So at the last minute, literally almost at the last minute, they brought in this young whippersnapper, I guess is how I see him, Brent Wisner, who really never tried a big case like this before, a young guy in his 30s, and he was brought in.
To work with Dave Dickens from the Miller firm and take this case to trial.
They didn't want to delay.
They didn't want to leave and miss his chance.
It was quite theatrical.
Brent was an actor when he was a child.
He was still a little bit of acting.
And he sure did that in the trial.
He was amazing.
He's amazing.
He reminded me of Jonah Hill.
And he has this very, very kind of buoyant...
Personality that I think really connected with the jury, and I don't think anybody could have tried that case better.
The weird thing was, immediately after Mike got injured in that terrible accident, we had a call from him at Bob Hedlund with Brent on the call, and Mike was saying to Brent, you know, Brent had been working on the case for a year, and he said, you're gonna have to take over A lot of the litigation responsibilities because I'm out, but his partner, Tim Litzenberg, was on the call and was going to lead the litigation.
During that phone call, Tim Litzenberg had a grand mal seizure and just disappeared from the phone call.
And then, you know, the next day we learned that Tom Hedlund and Brent was going to have to lead the litigation.
Because the Miller firm was, you know, really behind the eight ball.
Yeah, dropping like flies.
You know, I described that scene in the book where Dave is on the phone and Tim is in there in the office with him.
And Dave describes seeing Tim start to wobble a little bit and lean.
And then all of a sudden he's going down and hits his head on the corner of the desk.
And Dave is just like, what?
You know, we've just lost Mike Miller in this accident.
And now Tim is going, what is going on?
You know, as I said, it was like a movie, the way this played out, I think.
And of course, Tim now is in prison, which was another interesting turn that had nothing to do with the Johnson case, but played out later.
It's been a really interesting cast of characters to watch and to learn from.
I spent a lot of the time in the book trying to also share with readers sort of what I found it really fascinating myself to delve more deeply into the court system and how it works because even though I've been a reporter for 30 years and I've covered numerous court cases,
I learned so much really watching and learning and Trying to research how this all works, the good, the bad, and the ugly, you know, how the sausage is made in these very big cases.
You know, I think there's a lot of debate in Washington, obviously.
It's been there for many years about trying to rein in, should the plaintiff's bar be reined in, these personal injury attorneys.
There's a lot of discussion about exploitation of people and ambulance chasing and And I certainly see an element of that, I think, looking into this a little bit deeper.
But I also came to understand so clearly that without the Miller firm and the Baum-Hendland firm and the work that you do and others, these companies never get held accountable.
The regulators aren't doing it.
The lawmakers aren't doing it.
It's really in the hands of lawyers who are willing to put their reputations on the line and their money and their time.
And their lives, you know, it takes weeks, months, years away from their personal life to try these cases.
It's not a perfect system, but it's really all we have, and thank God we have it.
As you point out, the attorneys, the firms that are bringing these cases oftentimes are betting their entire existence on a specific case.
They'll put five, ten million dollars into a case, and if they don't win that case, The firm could be bankrupt or in terrible trouble.
I think there were at least two firms in the Monsanto litigation that if we had not won those cases, that those firms would have probably been out of business and the attorneys who were running those firms would have probably been personally bankrupt.
Yeah, no, I've talked to a number of them involved in the roundup litigation and they were mortgaging houses and taking out new business loans and A lot of law firms, there's a whole hedge fund investor scheme and program that's out there for investors to invest in this sort of litigation.
Again, I don't think it should be that way.
We should have a system where companies that engage in wrongdoing and market harmful products are regulated more tightly and are held accountable through our existing laws and systems of justice, but that isn't the way it works.
So you have to have this system Where you have these firms who are wealthy, quite wealthy, and can take on these cases, or you never get justice for people.
You're right.
I mean, millions of dollars just for the database alone, that the discovery documents, millions of pages of discovery documents to maintain that and to use the technology and the artificial intelligence that's necessary to be able to go through those and Find the relevant pieces of information that you need to make that case.
That's over a million dollars a year for that database alone.
It's a big money game and it's unfortunate.
There are a lot of the plaintiffs that I've talked to in this roundup litigation, there are now, what, 100,000 or so people that sued Monsanto, alleging that these herbicides caused them to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
And a lot of them have been getting settlement payouts or being offered settlement payouts now.
Bayer, which bought Monsanto, After losing three trials, the Johnson trial and then Harding and Pilliad, and the last one, Pilliad, with the $2 billion verdict, Bayer decided to settle these cases and has offered around $10 billion to spread among all of these people.
But what these plaintiffs are finding is, you know, they don't wind up with very much once the lawyers get paid and insurance gets reimbursed, if there is, and taxes, if it's structured in a way that they have to pay taxes.
And a lot of them are very disappointed.
Again, it's an imperfect system.
Even Lee Johnson has expressed some disappointment.
When you're told you're going to get $289 million, and then you get $20 million less taxes and lawyers fees and all that sort of thing, it's a disappointment.
It's not a perfect system.
There's really probably no way to adequately compensate people for the suffering that they undergo when they are faced with cancer, and especially terminal cancer.
Thank God we have these lawyers who are trying to do this work.
What's next for you?
I hope never to write another book about Monsanto.
I'm looking at different chemicals actually right now.
Paraquat is another one.
These all sound so nerdy, right, to talk about glyphosate or paraquat.
Paraquat's another herbicide though that there's a real scientific consensus now that exposure to paraquat contributes in a great degree to the development of Parkinson's disease.
Parkinson's disease is on the rise.
There are Cases that are being brought around the United States now that could rival, could grow to be as large as the Roundup litigation by people alleging that their exposure to Paraquat herbicide has caused them or their loved ones to develop Parkinson's disease.
You know, that's on the radar screen.
And there are more Roundup trials scheduled.
There's another one July 19 out in California that's scheduled right now, and another one scheduled in September.
BEAR keeps trying to settle these.
The judge, the federal judge, most recently, when Bayer tried to put forward a proposal that would shut off future cases, essentially, kind of put a clamp on future trials, keep people from being able to seek punitive damages in any future roundup trials.
The federal judge denied it, you know, and said, we see why you want to do this.
You've lost three trials.
Looks like the weight of scientific evidence is favoring the plaintiffs right now, and we see why you want to cut this off, but, you know, we're not going to help you do it.
Bayer now has said that they're going to consider taking Roundup off the residential market in the U.S. So I'm still writing about that and just really trying to keep people abreast of the dangers of these different pesticides and how we need to look at the risks as well as the rewards and help keep us all safer, help keep our kids safer.
The irony is that farm workers are probably suffering more than home gardeners from Monsanto, but we Represented almost exclusively home gardeners because you can isolate glyphosate and the impacts on glyphosate.
If you're a farm worker, you handle 20 different kinds of neonicotid pesticides and all of these other pesticides.
And it's hard to say that your non-Hodgkin's lymphoma came from the Monsanto if the other side can come in and say, well, you sprayed all these other different pesticides.
We really, the groups that we were representing were mainly home gardeners who could testify that the only chemical that they had and never had contact with was glyphosate.
Yeah, someone asked me that just earlier this week, actually.
Why are we not seeing a lot of farmers in this litigation?
And that's the exact reason.
Farmers are typically not using just one pesticide.
They're typically using a lot of different pesticides if they are conventionally farming, if they are using pesticides.
So, you know, they may be exposed to atrazine and clopirifos and paraquat, as well as glyphosate, dicamba, 2,4-D, a whole array of these chemicals.
And it's important to know, though, that if farmers are using them, we're all exposed too.
These are, there are residues commonly found.
I was just looking at the most recent FDA report.
312 different pesticides found on thousands of food samples looked at by the FDA.
More than 50% of the samples that they looked at contained pesticide residues, chloropolis, Chlorpyrifos, known to be Damaging the children's brains is right up there at the top.
Glyphosate was one of the most prevalent found in our foods, found in air, water.
As I said at the beginning of our conversation, there's a prevalence of these pesticides in our environment now, and it's incredibly hard to avoid them, particularly glyphosate, which is sprayed on so much of our food.
It's important, I think, that we all are aware of the risks and that we can, if we're concerned, we can make choices to limit our risk, hopefully, and to let our policymakers know that we want Better protection, better public policies, more stringent regulation.
This is all really important if we want our kids to have a healthier future and their kids and their kids and their kids and so on.
I mean, it's important for people to know if you're eating bread, if you're eating anything with corn in it, it's in your wine, it's in your children's breakfast cereals, it's in your beer.
It's ubiquitous now in the environment.
You really have to go out of your way to eat food that doesn't have it.
And we were able to sue on one illness, which was non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, because the science had matured on that.
But there's all kinds of illnesses that Clearly, they're being aggravated by glyphosate.
A lot of the neurodevelopmental disorders that we're seeing, the gluten allergies, which were coterminous with glyphosate, many kinds of non-alcoholic fatty liver cancer, which we're now seeing in children for the first time in history.
And the culprit is almost certainly glyphosate and many, many, many other injuries and illnesses that we're seeing in our children and in adults.
Yeah, definitely.
I was just preparing a presentation, actually, to talk to a group of environmental doctors in the next few days and just re-looking and looking at some of the new literature.
And, you know, it really is just starting to stack up to a really worrisome situation with glyphosate because it isn't just cancer, as you said.
There's a lot of research now that non-alcoholic fatty liver disease ties there.
You're seeing liver disease in animals that are fed these crops with glyphosate residues in them.
And a lot more evidence starting to show up that glyphosate is an endocrine disruptor, which, you know, these EDC chemicals are particularly worrisome because they interfere with the hormones in the body.
And that can play out a whole array of ways, right, affecting your immune system, but also reproductive problems and things like that.
So it's probably been a really, really bad idea to spray this chemical all over, you know, soybeans and corn and The sugar beets and alfalfa that the animals eat and even wheat.
And barley and soy and everything.
What Monsanto would say is the world can't survive without life.
Well, that's what they say.
There really isn't any sort of literature out there that supports that that wasn't generated by Monsanto.
We have an abundance of corn.
I guess there are so many different ways to argue that, but one thing I could say is we have over a billion bushels of corn and soybeans right now in ending stocks in the U.S. This is a data point that our USDA tracked.
Over a billion bushels of corn every year that we don't use.
We don't use it in ethanol.
We don't feed it to livestock.
We don't sell it overseas.
We don't feed it to starving people.
It's extra.
It's stuff we can't get rid of.
And yet this is what Monsanto is pushing is let's grow more corn.
Let's grow more soybeans.
We need to feed the world.
The world has enough corn and soybeans and sugar beets and wheat and cotton and canola and all these other things that glyphosate is designed to be sprayed with.
The reason that you have food insecurity and scarcity in a number of countries and regions around the world has nothing to do with the lack of chemicals.
It has everything to do with infrastructure, political upheaval, distribution resources, transportation, a whole lot of different factors that our United Nations has looked at.
And the United Nations has studied this issue in depth and has said repeatedly, we don't need Pesticides in these prevalent ways that we're using them to feed the world.
And they called for a new treaty among countries to reduce pesticide use because the risks so far outweigh the rewards.
And you have a number of farmers around the U.S., a growing number of farmers, as well as food companies and grain handlers and others, that are recognizing not only the human health implications but the environmental health implications that come with an overuse of glyphosate and other pesticides and they're looking and doing and investing in what we call regenerative agriculture or more sustainable farming practices where you don't use as many pesticides or you don't use them in the ways that
you were before you don't use them at all and they're finding that their yields are matching or in some ways beating Or these crops that are being grown with pesticides.
So there are rewards, obviously, with pesticides.
If there weren't, farmers wouldn't have been using them.
These companies wouldn't have been making billions of dollars.
But the risk reward ratio, the calculus, has swung way out of balance.
And if we don't get it back in balance, restore it, our kids are going to have a very dark and unhealthy future.
We're already seeing that play out right now.
One of the things we're seeing is that glyphosate not only poisons the plants, but it destroys the soil.
It destroys these very rich ecosystems that are critical for food productivity.
And the long-term injury from glyphosate actually is correlated with a decline in per acre production all over the world.
There's a really wonderful movie that I know you've seen, which is called Kiss the Ground.
Everybody's seen that, haven't they?
Yeah.
One of my favorite documentaries.
Can you talk about what consumers can do to protect themselves and leave on a positive note just for two minutes or so?
Okay, let me ask you.
Because all I've done is lived a dark and...
This is the doom and gloom show.
We have a lot of moms who get this podcast who are worried about chemical exposures to their children, and a lot of their children already have sensitivities.
What can consumers do to avoid glyphosate and these other pesticides in their foods?
Yeah, well, it's a good question.
It's pretty hard to do, obviously, but the easiest answer, I guess, that What is most obvious also is eat organic.
Glyphosate and these other synthetic pesticides are typically not allowed, you know, under the organic standard for production of organic fruits and vegetables and all these different foods.
So that's one way to reduce it.
There's a study out of California that came out in 2017.
A teen, I believe it was, that showed that you can drop your glyphosate levels in your urine pretty dramatically and pretty quickly by switching to an organic diet.
So there have been a number of studies out there that show that you really can reduce your exposure if you really pay attention to the types of foods that you're buying and feeding your family.
Gary, thank you so much for joining me.
Gary's book is The Monsanto Papers.
Please go to Amazon, go to Barnes& Noble, even better, and buy your copy of it.
Monsanto Papers.
Let's drive it up on the bestseller list.
While you're up there, get a copy of my new book, which is going to come out on July 20th, The Real Anthony Fauci.
We've got to drive that onto the bestseller list.
So please order from Barnes& Noble your pre-production copy.
Carrie, you're one of my great heroes.
Thank you so much for what you're doing.
Carrie is now at Writes Now, right?
U.S. Right to Know.
Yeah, a little tiny nonprofit trying to pull all these documents and data together and do Freedom of Information Acts and then requests and then share them with reporters and anybody who's interested.
