Two major battles over pesticide policy are unfolding at the federal level, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.
The dispute: Can states protect their citizens from pesticide harms beyond what federal law requires, or will that authority be stripped away? These are the urgent questions that a pending Supreme Court case and a fight over the farm bill could play major roles in answering.
The chemical at the center of all of this? Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup and the keystone product of the Bayer-Monsanto corporation. Critics of the controversial weedkiller link it to a number of health harms through exposure.
To help unravel the legal docket, EWG co-Founder and President Ken Cook is joined by Chuck Benbrook, Ph.D. He has worked on pesticide issues in roles during the Carter administration, for Congress and with the National Academy of Sciences, and has served as an expert witness in many of the cases he and Cook discuss.
Benbrook is urging the Supreme Court to preserve the right of states to hold pesticide companies accountable when federal regulators fall short.
Disclaimer: This transcript was compiled using software and may include typographical errors.
RoundUp Ad Voice: Weeding again, hey Bob?
Bob: Huh?
RoundUp Ad Voice: Why not do it once? Do it right?
Bob: Why is your head in the ground?
RoundUp Ad Voice: I'm gonna watch Roundup kill these roots.
Bob: Hey, this is Spike's area.
RoundUp Ad Voice: Bob… Roundup can be used where kids and pets will play and breaks down into natural materials. Since Roundup kills the root, what's not coming back, Bob?
Bob: The weed.
RoundUp Ad Voice: You betcha. Bob, come on down and take a peek.
Bob: Can I squirt one?
RoundUp Ad Voice: Sure, Bob.
Ken Cook: Hello there. I'm Ken Cook and I'm having another episode. And this is an episode that's happening during glyphosate week, which is the end of April, beginning of May. It's glyphosate week for two reasons. There are two major battles that unfolded this week around this weed killer made by Bayer. One major battle took place in the Supreme Court.
And that's what we'll focus on with my guest today Dr. Charles Benbrook, who is a long time student, an expert in the field of pesticide policy, and has also been, uh, very deeply involved in some of the court cases that the Supreme Court is considering a measure to overturn. And we'll get into that. It's, um, it's, it's really directly relevant to a lot of what we've been talking about with respect to how decisions are made on pesticide policy and toxics policy generally, and how the Trump administration has time and again, taken the side of pesticide and chemical companies.
And this is, no, this is no exception. But the other thing that happened just this morning, and I'm talking about April 30th, took place in the House of Representatives. There was a move by the House Agriculture Committee in their Farm Bill. They put a provision in that would've blocked liability for Bayer and other pesticide companies in state court, and would also have taken away some of the ability of states just basically to protect their citizens beyond what EPA does.
You may have heard of this flood of litigation against Bayer, formerly known as Monsanto, with respect to this weed killer glyphosate — trade name is Roundup — the flood of litigation because thousands and thousands of people have gone to court and claimed that glyphosate contributed to non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a kind of blood cancer that many people have come down with.
It's a, not an epidemic, but it's a, a serious disease that's growing in this country, and glyphosate has been fingered as one of the likely causes. So the House of Representatives weighed in on behalf, at least the House Agriculture Committee weighed in on behalf of Bayer and Monsanto and put this in their Farm Bill — brought it to the house floor.
We'll probably have another session on this topic too — brought it to the house floor — and it was challenged. First by Democrats, Chellie Pingree and Jim McGovern. Then challenged by Chellie Pingree and Thomas Massey, a Republican of Kentucky. And then, most notably challenged by Republican Congresswoman Luna from Florida.
And she stood up to the Trump administration, to the House Agriculture Committee, to Big Ag, to MAGA, to basically the powers that be in chemical agriculture and said, no, I am not going to vote and allow a measure in the Farm Bill to block liability for people who want to go to court, who believe that Roundup this chemical has caused their cancer or other harms.
So she stood up, an amendment. She got lots of grief from Republican leadership, lots of grief from the Republican dominated agriculture committee that voted overwhelmingly to put this amendment into the Farm Bill — against overwhelming opposition from Democrats on the agriculture committee. She went to the floor, and she got 73 Republicans to vote along with hundreds of Democrats to strip this language out of the bill.
And the final vote was overwhelming, a landslide, that stripped this Bayer, Trump administration, big Ag provision out of the Farm Bill, so that liability would not be blocked against people who were seeking justice in the courts. So it's an extremely important week in pesticide policy, an extremely important week with respect to the politics around MAHA, which we've been talking about quite a bit.
The fundamental question was, can states protect their residents from pesticide harms beyond what federal law might require, or the federal agency in charge EPA dictates, or will that authority be stripped away? And at least we know now from the vote in the House of Representatives this morning, that will not happen as part of the Farm Bill.
So the chemical, again at the center of all of this is called glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide roundup and other herbicides. And the stakes really couldn't be higher because human lives are at risk. They have been at risk, and human lives have been lost. So before we get into the episode, I wanna give some context on two things.
What does preemption mean and what is happening at the Supreme Court? Preemption is a legal doctrine that says, when federal law and state law conflict, federal law wins. In the pesticide context, the question is, if the EPA approves a pesticide and sets the language on its warning label, can a state court still hold a company liable for failing to warn consumers about health risks like cancer — risks that aren't mentioned on that federal label?
And EPA is very good about not mentioning on their label when pesticides might be linked to cancer. Instead, preferring, which is exactly what the pesticide makers prefer, that they make adjustments to how the pesticide might be handled or changes to instructions to farm workers or farmers put on gloves, change the time when you apply it, don't do it when it's too windy.
Soft changes like that rather than just coming right out and saying, “Hey, this stuff is carcinogenic.” Now, Bayer, which acquired Monsanto in a very controversial acquisition some years ago, they argue the answer is no. Since the EPA approved roundup and didn't require a cancer warning, Bayer says, the states have no business second guessing that through lawsuits or allowing litigation that second guesses that.
This is the preemption argument, federal regulatory approval essentially shields them from state liability. The case before the Supreme Court involves a plaintiff named John Darnell, one of thousands of people who claim Roundup's active ingredient glyphosate caused their non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. The Supreme Court asked the Trump administration to weigh in.
It sided with Bayer. It said, sure, we'll weigh in — their message, EPA approved the label — case closed no matter who got sick. A large group of state attorneys general, including some Republicans from red states, disagreed saying states have always had the right to hold companies accountable through their courts, regardless of what a federal label might say.
At the same time, as I mentioned, Congress was debating attaching a preemption provision to the Farm Bill and that was defeated, today. Glad to announce that. To walk us through all of this. I'm joined by Dr. Chuck Benbrook, a longtime colleague and one of the foremost experts on pesticide policy in the country, and specifically one of the foremost experts on glyphosate.
Chuck has worked on these issues from the halls of Congress to the Carter administration to the National Academy of Sciences, and he served as, as an expert witness in many of the cases, like the ones we're discussing today.
Dr. Benbrook recently submitted a formal scientific and legal argument known as an amicus brief to the Supreme Court, urging the justices to preserve the right of states to hold pesticide companies accountable when federal regulators fall short, and boy, do they fall short time and again. There's arguably no better person on the planet to walk us through how we got here, what's really at stake, and why the next few weeks could determine the future of pesticide accountability in this country for a very long time.
Not just glyphosate, not just this one pesticide, but the basic ability for people to hold these pesticide companies accountable. Chuck, welcome to the show and thanks for joining me.
Chuck Benbrook: Well, looking forward to it, uh, Ken. But first, uh, thanks for, uh, inviting me onto the podcast. It's a great honor, and I, I think I would be remiss not to share with your listeners, um, the, the day I first met you, I was, uh, working in the new executive office building for the Council on Environmental Quality in the Carter administration.
And you were a stringer for the Journal of Soil Water Conservation.
Ken Cook: That's correct.
Chuck Benbrook: Uh, a, a young reporter trying to scrape out a living at, uh, 25 bucks a piece, uh, for, uh, an article. And, uh, you called me up and said, I understand you're involved in this Resources Conservation Act implementation, that that was an issue for you and the journal.
And I said, yes, said, well, can I come talk to you? I said, sure. So you set at an appointment and you came into the building and back then they called you upstairs and you came down. And so I came down to meet my, uh, my soon to become very good friend Ken Cook, and greeted this guy in Birkenstocks without socks, white shorts, and a white t-shirt. I'll never forget it.
Ken Cook: Right. That was, that was a, a official journalistic garb for me back then. And, uh, it, it, uh, it served me well. I got a lot of scoops in that as I was writing that column for a decade or so, I can't remember. Max Schnat, the great editor of that journal, yeah, you can let me have my way. But yeah, I remember, I remember that very well.
Chuck Benbrook: It's been a, a, a wonderful friendship and a, and a wonderful journey in a lot of ways, and, you know, it's kind of a journey that feels like maybe things are turning around a little bit,
Ken Cook: Fingers crossed.
Chuck Benbrook: But where did all of this, uh, tension about glyphosate come from?
Well, a couple things that, that, that stand out. A, as you know, and most of your listeners know, glyphosate is a broad spectrum herbicide, and pretty much anything that is green and growing, if you spray it on it, it kills it. So, before the advent of genetically engineered crops that, that were genetically modified to tolerate glyphosate being sprayed on them, farmers could only use glyphosate before their crop came up, or they, they sprayed it on their crop. They'd kill the weeds and the crop, or it could be used at after the harvest to kind of clean things up and get a field ready for the next year. So the, the agricultural market for Roundup herbicides, which came on the market in ‘74, was quite limited by the very way that the product worked.
Until 1996, the year that the first genetically engineered, so-called Roundup ready crop came on the market, which was Roundup ready soybeans and roundup ready cotton. These new technologies which require genetically engineering the seed to express a gene that allowed the soybean plant and the cotton plant to go ahead, spray Roundup on me, “I, I'm, I'll be just fine.”
Ken Cook: “We love it. We love it.” Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: “We love it.” Yeah. Yeah,
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: That technology, it worked very well. And it came along at a time when farmers were super frustrated and pissed off about all the problems that they were having with weed control. The products on the market at the time, they were having to spray three or four different ones to control different weeds.
There were lots of bad interactions between the herbicides. They were spending more and more money. A lot of the herbicides were persistent in that they carried over, and if the farmers didn't watch it, they'd spray the herbicide and control the weeds in the soybean year of the rotation, but they'd end up screwing up the corn that was planted the next year.
So there were, there was a lot of problems with weed management. It wasn't working well. It was complicated. And the costs were going up. So when this Roundup ready system came along, which couldn't be easier, you just couldn't screw it up, it was such an easy system to do well because you pay the extra money for the seeds that had the trait, and then you plant your Roundup ready soybeans, and then when the weeds come up, you just spray Roundup and it kills all the weeds.
Ken Cook: Yeah. And well into the growing season, if you needed to it, the, the, the corn could be this high, the soybeans and, and you could take care of the weeds. It, it helped farmers a lot. I, one, farmers used to tell me all the time that they couldn't have made their operations bigger, which they wanted to do to generate more revenue, they couldn't have done that if Roundup ready technology had not come along and made that vital planting operation so much faster and simpler.
Chuck Benbrook: So starting in 1996, as this, uh, GMO crop revolution unfolded like, you know, a tsunami over American agriculture. It changed EWG, it changed what I was working on.
Ken Cook: Totally.
Chuck Benbrook: I got sucked from working on pesticides to working on genetically engineered crops. The foundations moved all their money, as you remember.
Ken Cook: Yep, yep.
Chuck Benbrook: And the sales of, of Roundup just took off like a, a rocket from 1996 until about 2005 or six, Roundup moved closer and closer to the most heavily applied pesticide in the country.
But around 2005, 2006, it passed atrazine and became number one.
Ken Cook: Another prominent weed killer. Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: Another corn herbicide, but had some major growth still in it. And it peaked about 2015 and at that point there was about three pounds of glyphosate applied in US agriculture for every, every pound of atrazine.
So not only had it become number one, but it passed it threefold.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: It was by far the most heavily applied pesticide ever in history in the world. Around 2015, there was enough glyphosate applied in the United States to spray three quarters of a pound of the active ingredient on every cropland acre in the country.
And globally it was about two thirds of a pound. So you just wrap your mind around it.
Ken Cook: Yeah. I don't think I've ever, maybe I've shared this story with you. I, I talked to an editor from a, an agricultural trade publication around the 2005, 6, 8 period there, and, um, asked how things were going. And this person said, well, it's, it's pretty tough because we're losing advertisers.
And I said, well, why are you losing advertisers? And she said, well, we used to have all these pesticide companies, weed killer companies buying ads in our magazine. And that kept us afloat. But once Roundup came along and it was so universally used relative to anything else, the ad flow stopped from the other companies 'cause they just kind of gave up. So even, it even affected journalistic coverage of agriculture and the ability to do that. Incredible.
Chuck Benbrook: Of course. So I started my work in the pesticide world in 1981 when I took the job as the staff director of the DORFA subcommittee. And at that point, there were 23 pesticide companies that had Washington reps that came and lobbied young staffers like me.
23 of them. And now there's four left.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: So the, the concentration in the industry is a huge issue. So the use of glyphosate just took off like a rocket starting in 1996. But not only did the agricultural use go up, but there was continued growth in the lawn and garden, forestry, government arena, industrial arena, because Monsanto recognized that there were lots of other markets where they could sell Roundup, and in particular the home and lawn and garden markets, so people that would buy it at Walmart or Lowe's or Home Depot and spray weeds in their, you know, their driveway or in around the yard or…
Ken Cook: Yeah, playgrounds.
Chuck Benbrook: Or plant a garden. So you gotta kill the grass before you till the soil, so you spray Roundup. So Monsanto aggressively went after those markets with great success and had they had specially formulated versions of lawn and garden Roundup.
As the diversity of uses of Roundup expanded incrementally, but over 20 years, there were so many different ways that people were handling the product, spraying the product, and so many different ways that people were being exposed to the product.
Ken Cook: I have to remind you here, I was invited by one of the pesticide trade associations to address their annual conference, uh, because in their, by the early to mid 1990s, EWG was very much on their radar as a, a problem in pesticide policy.
And I reminded the audience of a Monsanto commercial at the time where someone dressed as if ready to go to the airport, and that was the plot line of the commercial, a TV commercial, leaned out the window of the taxi cab, and sprayed Roundup on his driveway and sidewalk to kill the weeds, and then just brought the Roundup bottle back into the cab and off they went.
And that's just how safe and easy it was. I don't know if we could ever find that ad, but they pushed it very hard and they brought modern marketing to bear.
Chuck Benbrook: Yeah. All throughout this period of when Roundup use was going up, glyphosate use was going up so much, the percentage of the total glyphosate sales represented by Ag versus the non-Ag market stayed roughly the same around 10%.
The Ag went up fast and the non-Ag stayed 10%, but it grew because the other was growing.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: In the last 20 years, Monsanto has made almost as much profit from the 10% of glyphosate they've sold into the lawn and garden market as the 90% that they've sold to agriculture. So what does that tell you? Well, they're obviously marking up the glyphosate much more.
It's a lot of packaging, a lot of promotion. And you know, somebody goes into Home Depot to buy a, a, you know, a gallon of ready to use glyphosate. They're not that concerned if it costs 19 bucks or 22 bucks, they know it's gonna last for quite a while and they want to control their weeds. So Monsanto was, has always been able to profit, uh, much more significantly from the lawn and garden market, but yet they never did any focused research on the exposure patterns and risks that were unique to that market.
Ken Cook: That gets us to Dwayne Lee Johnson, I think, doesn't it?
Chuck Benbrook: It absolutely does. So there's two major things that happened that brought glyphosate into the middle of this massive increase in the use and diversification of the ways that it was being used, and the ways that we were all exposed to it, including this crazy idea to start spraying it on a wheat crop two weeks before harvest.
RoundUp Ad: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: The so-called pre-harvest use — that you and EWG are finally, I think, going to have some success in ending. Thank God. That's half of it. Then the other half is that in March of 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which is part of the World Health Organization issued a very unexpected classification of glyphosate and glyphosate based herbicides, which would include Roundup as a probable human carcinogen.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: This came out of the blue. People, including me, were shocked 'cause we had followed the toxicity data and the EPAs human health risk assessments on glyphosate and, and, you know, glyphosate looked a, about as safe as any herbicide that had ever been registered and now all of a sudden IARC is saying it's a probable human carcinogen.
That's what triggered the interest among tort lawyers out there, and IARC said that the evidence was strongest linking Roundup to non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. So people that had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and had been using Roundup for 20 years, they said, “Hey, geez, I wonder if the Roundup contributed to my non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.”
And so they talked to a lawyer, do I have a case? And indeed they did. And Dwayne Lee Johnson, the groundskeeper for the Bonita school district just a little north of where you live, Ken.
Ken Cook: Yeah, that's right.
Chuck Benbrook: I believe it was either six or seven school campuses that he was responsible for controlling weeds and other pest control activities.
So he probably spent more time spraying Roundup than almost any other specific task in his job. And in his years of doing that, he had two very serious exposure episodes where he really got dosed. That's why his non-Hodgkin's lymphoma came on in only four years after the exposures. Usually non-Hodgkin's lymphoma has a longer latency period, but those were the two events.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer, carefully going through the data and explaining why in their judgment and based on their classification system, the evidence now supports the fact that glyphosate state-based herbicides probably cause cancer. Yeah. Well that, that's what triggered the initiation of the litigation.
Ken Cook: That was a case that was brought in state court right here in the state of California. The ruling came down in in his favor. And for most of these cases where it was in favor of the plaintiff, the initial amounts, the penalties or the settlements that were announced have been reduced by, over the course of appeals and reviews and so forth.
But it was very substantial. And on top of that, um, it, it was pretty clear that there would be many more such cases, and that has turned out to be in fact what happened.
Chuck Benbrook: Yeah, so the, the Roundup non-Hodgkin's lymphoma litigation ha, you know, has dwarfed any past pesticide litigation in the history of the US by multiple orders of magnitude.
And in fact, Ken, I think the only mass tort litigation that's involved more overall settlements would be asbestos. I mean, it's,
Ken Cook: Yeah, probably, yeah,
Chuck Benbrook: There's been about a 110,000 cases that either, the vast majority of course, have settled there. There's only been like 32 trials, in 11 years. It takes a lot to get through all of the hurdles to actually have a trial.
And Bayer Monsanto has not wanted to go to trial, because that's when they're vulnerable to, what's called a punitive damage award. So Lee Johnson, who, he had pretty strong evidence that his massive exposures to to Roundup caused his non-Hodgkins lymphoma.
And he had actually called the one 800 number on the bottle to talk to Monsanto physicians went after he'd been diagnosed and he asked them, is it safe for me to go back and continue to spray Roundup even though I've been diagnosed with non Hodgkin's lymphoma? And guess what they said?
Ken Cook: Yeah, no problem Lee.
Chuck Benbrook: Yeah, your use of Roundup had nothing to do with your cancer, when they knew that it probably did.
The jury was so convinced that Monsanto's behavior was unacceptable,
Ken Cook: And that resulted in punitive damages on top of, uh, other damages
Chuck Benbrook: $250 million for one man.
Ken Cook: So you were part of that legal team as an expert witness, that, that helped Johnson's legal team succeed in that case. And another person who was part of that legal team is our current Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and he shared in the proceeds of the settlement, the share that went to the lawyers. Don't know how they divided it up, it's not been made public, but this was a case that he was integrally involved in.
And at, if you look back at the time, he made some very strong statements as he's mostly continued to make ever since about the importance of dealing with the threat that Roundup poses to human health, not just Mr. Johnson's, God bless him, but lots of other people. And he recruited people as well to bring similar cases as I understand it, uh, in other venues.
Chuck Benbrook: Let's also remember what else was going on at this time.
Bayer really wanted to buy Monsanto, either wanted to merge or acquire Monsanto, and that was actually coming to fruition in early 2018. The Lee Johnson trial started, I believe in March and concluded in May. Yeah. And the acquisition, the $63 billion check that Bayer wrote to buy Monsanto occurred right before that trial started, and at the time when Bayer wrote that $63 billion check to buy Monsanto and all of its liability, there were already 4,500 cases had been filed.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: So Bayer knew that it was going to be a significant body of litigation. I think it's, it's fair to predict that the Monsanto folks told the Bayer people, oh, this is just BS litigation. The science isn't there. We're gonna, we'll win the first few cases and it'll all go away.
I mean, there's no way that Bayer would've gone through with the acquisition.
Ken Cook: You wouldn't think
Chuck Benbrook: Unless they did believe that,
Ken Cook: You know, you, you wouldn't think, and back in around, right. At that time, I had some, some folks I was talking to with Bayer, based in Europe. And if you leave out the Monsanto conversations, Bayer was beginning to take much more seriously developing low risk, organic compliant, even pesticides of all kinds of different kinds.
They had an investment in a facility here in California to do it that I was proud to, to view. And the thought that a major player like Bayer would be weighing in, in a way that would be beneficial because of less toxic, maybe less immediately effective, as is often the case, but less toxic weed killers and other pesticides.
And I remember saying to them, when I heard that they might be buying Monsanto, I said, look, I don't know all the financial considerations or the market considerations, but what I will tell you is what I mostly know about Monsanto beyond what I know about, uh, what's happened with, with Roundup, is what they did with PCBs.
'Cause I have a member of my board from Aniston, Alabama, and we worked with him in the years before when Monsanto knew and lied about, hid from their community in Aniston what PCBs were doing to the community of Aniston, particularly a, a poor community that wasn't entirely African American, but, but largely African American.
And my current board member, David Baker, was the guy who pushed back against Monsanto, led the charge in the community, brought Johnny Cochran to town, had thousands of people lined up and got a huge settlement, the largest settlement at that time, based on fundamentally civil rights law, that they had violated the civil rights of that community.
And they, I think they came in with about a $700 million settlement for the community against Monsanto on PCBs. And I just said, look, if it's in the DNA of a company to not let you know. And this was always in the backdrop for the two of us, I think too with, with uh, GMO crops, right? This was not the kind of company that was gonna step up.
Now most of them don't. But we felt, I felt, in particular, knowing the PCB history, knowing how much money was at stake in, in Roundup, I just didn't trust the company, and I said that to these folks I knew at, at Bayer. But it was higher ups making the decisions. I think it was a bad call, but we'll see how the courts decide.
Chuck Benbrook: It's probably worth sharing, Bayer did not buy Monsanto for Roundup. They bought Monsanto for the intellectual property methods to genetically engineer seeds, and plus of course, they got all of Monsanto seeds. Monsanto, by the time Bayer bought them, had control of much of the base genetics for corn and soybeans in the United States.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: That was the real reason that drove Bayer to want to acquire Monsanto, because Monsanto was making a lot of money off of the licensing of the genetic engineering traits to all other seed companies. And when a company has intellectual property like that, that they license to other companies, it's a perpetual cash machine.
Ken Cook: Yeah. It's like owning the operating system for American agriculture in a significant way. Right? And look what that's done for Microsoft and Apple and others who stepped in, right?
Chuck Benbrook: Yeah. Yeah. So that's what Bayer was, was after and, um, so the, the Johnson case happened and about six months later, the Hardeman case.
Ken Cook: Yes.
Chuck Benbrook: And the Hardeman case was very important because it was the first trial in the federal multi-district litigation. The MDL litigation run by a, a, a very hard-nosed judge named Vince Chhabria.
Ken Cook: Here in San Francisco, the Ninth Circuit, right
Chuck Benbrook: here in San Francisco, and Chhabria to the benefit of Bear and, and Monsanto, bifurcated the trial into two parts. The plaintiff's Hardeman had to get through the first part to get to the second part of the trial.
The first part was just the general causation. Was there adequate science evidence linking exposure to Roundup and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma to meet the standard of, it's more likely than not that Hardeman's exposure to Roundup contributed to his disease — contributed in a significant way?
Ken Cook: But where was Hardeman from?
Chuck Benbrook: He was from California. I don't remember where in California. He had used Roundup for 20 or 30 years
Ken Cook: On his property.
Chuck Benbrook: He wasn't a groundskeeper. He wasn't a farmer. He had been in good health. And the trial on the first part, on the general causation was.
Ken Cook: Yeah
Chuck Benbrook: That was Monsanto's and Bayer’s best shot at containing the litigation and the lawyers knew it, both sides, especially because the judge had seemed to be very open to many of the Bayer Monsanto attorney and expert arguments. Judge Chhabria was skeptical about the science.
Ken Cook: I was fully expecting the trial to end at that first juncture.
Chuck Benbrook: In that first phase of the Hardeman trial, the jury brought back a yes, we believe that Roundup contributed to his non Hodgkins lymphoma.
So phase two was liability and Monsanto's bad behavior, and how big should the compensatory damage award should be, how big should the punitive damage award be? And then just a few months after Hardeman, the Pilliod case. And the Pilliod case was what really blew it wide open. Alva and Alberta Pilliod, and after he retired from the Navy in good health, they would buy five acres of kind of rundown urban, suburban property in Northern California, clean it up.
They were birders, so they would take, each one would take their Roundup sprayer in the evening and walk through the properties and use the Roundup to make trails so they could go and watch the wildlife and the birds.
And, and it's hot, and it's hot in Northern California in the, in the spring and summer. And so they would wear flip flops or sneakers without socks. Shorts and t-shirts, because they'd been told it was safe. And because a lot of the spray solution would land on their lower legs and on their hands, they never got sick.
They didn't get a rash. Monsanto had told 'em it's safe and they knew they had it on them and they never got sick and they never had a rash. So they, they figured their lived experience was aligned with what Monsanto was saying. But Doc, there's a problem — when a chemical damages your DNA, you don't feel it.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: You, you don't get a rash.
Ken Cook: They were from Livermore, so they were out in the heat of the day. And if you've been to Livermore, you know how hot it gets over there, but yeah. And it, it got into their skin. And so what happened next?
Chuck Benbrook: Alva and Alberta Pilliod, a married couple, they got exactly the same type, the major type of non-Hodgkins lymphoma within like six months of each other.
So they got the same disease.
Ken Cook: Oh.
Chuck Benbrook: And the lawyer that presented the case, Brent Wisner, someone that you've met.
Ken Cook: Yeah. Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: He did a masterful job at the tail end of the case in presenting to the jury a way for them — if they so choose to impose punitive damages, how might they figure out the number? A million, 10 million?
And he brought to their attention multiple times during the trial, an email sent by medical doctor to the rest of the management team, the senior people in, involved in preserving their markets for Roundup. And this email chain was speculating about the impact of the IARC classification as a probable human carcinogen.
Ken Cook: Big problem for Monsanto. Big problem.
Chuck Benbrook: For big, big problem. And whether the IARC report would change the EPAs mind. So that they said no, the EPA position was, it was not likely to cause cancer. They, they were concerned about the IARC decision pushing EPA to at least go to possible carcinogen or maybe to a probable carcinogen, which is what the classification decision that IARC made.
So this, this medical officer wrote an email to the brass speculating about whether the, the IARC classification would change EPA, and he entitled it, the billion dollar question.
Ken Cook: There you go.
Chuck Benbrook: And Brent, in the end of his closing statement, the end of the closing statement, this is right before basically the case goes to the jury, he brought that that email back to the attention of the jury in a way that some of the jurors said, hmm, billion, billion, that, that's okay.
Well guess what the jury awarded? A billion dollars to both Alva and Alberta. So it's a $2 billion punitive damage award. One of the largest, punitive damage awards in history for two people.
Ken Cook: For anything. Yeah, for anything. It's this internal document, right? This secret stuff. Right. What they knew and when they knew it.
Profound impact, right? You could line up all the animal studies and all the rest of the evidence critically important to take that into account, but there's something about corporate malfeasance doing things dishonestly, that really rubbed a juror wrong.
Chuck Benbrook: So there were two other smoking gun, very impactful emails in all of these early trials.
The second one was an email by Donna Farmer sent to colleagues in Australia who were dealing with a major news program, investigative program, doing a story about this Roundup cause cancer. And they were getting advice from the brass in St. Louis about what they should say to the, the reporter. They had drafted a statement saying, oh, Roundup doesn't cause cancer, blah, blah, blah.
And she sends them an email saying, we can't say Roundup doesn't cause cancer, 'cause we haven't done the studies required to make that statement. Right in an email. Well, so the jury sees that email about five times.
Ken Cook: Yes, I remember that very well.
Chuck Benbrook: During the trial. And then my personal favorite, number three,
Ken Cook: I think I know which one this is, but go for it.
Chuck Benbrook: Yeah, yeah. You, you know what's coming. It was written by a senior scientist working for Monsanto Europe that had been involved with the very successful reregistration process in Europe, where the European regulators had basically told Monsanto Europe that they're gonna ban Roundup with polyethoxylated tallow amine POEA surfactants, because it was genotoxic, it was clearly damaging DNA.
Ken Cook: The surfactants are the things they add to the formulation to aid right in its efficacy on the leaf of the plant, right?
Chuck Benbrook: Correct. But it also speeds up the movement of the glyphosate through skin. And it also speeds up the glyphosate moving through a hematopoietic stem cell wall because the glyphosate's gotta get inside the cell to come into contact with the DNA to trigger the mutation that starts that cell on the path to non Hodgkin's lymphoma or leukemia or multiple myeloma, which are things that your buddy Benbrook learned through 11 years working on this litigation.
So this guy that helped Monsanto do this seamless transition where they voluntarily took all of the Roundup off the market that they were selling in Europe that was formulated with the POEA surfactants and replaced it with Roundup, formulated with another surfactant, coronary ammonia surfactants.
And it worked fine. They didn't lose any market. There was no big public concern. And so Dr. Richard Garnett, the guy that did this, was involved in a debate with the, again, the brass in St. Louis, the senior people who were trying to figure out what to do next. 'cause they were dealing with reregistration in the U.S.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: They were dealing with concerns in Mexico that wanted to end use of Roundup. Garnett and others put on the table, well, why don't we make the same change worldwide that we made to make Roundup safer in Europe?
Ken Cook: Why wouldn't you? Why wouldn't you?
Chuck Benbrook: Why wouldn't you? And, and so in the course of this long email change with, you know, the senior people, the key people that were the decision makers that
Ken Cook: Was never meant to be public.
Chuck Benbrook: That was never meant to be public.
This guy puts in a line, why should we keep making a hazardous pesticide when we know how to make a safer one. In the email!
Ken Cook: I remember
Chuck Benbrook: And, and so again, the jury saw that like five times over the weeks of the trial. I mean, what could be a clear admission that they understood that there were risks to the old Roundup? The Roundup that's still being sold to American farmers, by the way.
Ken Cook: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Again, that, you know, when will anyone learn if they haven't learned it already, that the coverup is worse than the crime.
Chuck Benbrook: Yeah. And that's when the advertising started all over the country. I mean, how many ads did all of us, you know, on the radio, on the TV billboards, if you used a lot of Roundup?
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: Mm-hmm. Call this number. Then of course the number of cases filed, you know, ballooned from several thousand to a hundred thousand, and now I think the total is, it's pushing 180,000 total.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: There's still new cases coming in. It's one of the things that, you know, we ought to talk about a little bit is that there's absolutely no change in how Bayer Monsanto has dealt with Roundup other than for the lawn and garden market.
They took the relatively low tox, active ingredient, glyphosate out of it, and put in three or four different herbicides, including most of them, that are much more toxic than glyphosate, which is just, it's such a irresponsible action by this company, and they say, oh, we did it because we have to curtail the liability risk.
Well. You know, there's gonna be a lot of people that are harmed by this new Roundup because it's still called Roundup. People don't know that there's four other pesticides in it and they think, well, I used to get it all over me and it never made me sick. Well, you get this stuff all over you, you are gonna get, you are gonna get sick. Other than that, they've done nothing.
Ken Cook: Yeah. Yeah. And they could have, as they said themselves. So let's talk through the case that proceeded that your Amicus Brief filed on behalf of Heartland Health and Research Alliance, HHRA. The Trump administration came in in the Ninth Circuit and said, yes, we want the Supreme Court to hear it, and yes, FIFRA preempts, the federal law preempts the states, being able to have any kind of parallel warning that should be made known to anyone who uses the product.
So that case just kind of dies out because the, the Biden administration comes along and says, no, we, we think FIFRA preemption here is not appropriate.
So Hardeman gets their settlement and then Mr. Darnell comes along. And at this point we have the Department of Justice under Biden is still saying, no, we, we don't, we don't think the Supreme Court should intervene. We don't think you should look at this case because it's settled. Preemption doesn't prevent these kinds of plaintiff's cases from coming forward.
But the new Supreme Court, as of the summer of 2025. Ask the incoming, the new Trump administration, been in office, not even a year, asks them, what should we do? Should we, should we take another look? Because maybe things have changed with the new administration. And sure enough, then that's when the Trump administration for the second time in the case, it's going to the Supreme Court, the Trump administration says the same thing in effect that it said before, yeah, these cases should be thrown out because FIFRA protects the companies.
Chuck Benbrook: I learned from a very reliable source that this issue of preemption and the tension within the MAHA world came up several months ago in a, a cabinet meeting that Trump was at, and he said, what's this about?
And somebody that knew a little bit about it said, oh, it's this preemption thing. And Trump said, we shouldn't agree with that. We don't want to give a free pass to chemical companies. He said that, and at the time wasn't expected, but the view was, well, it looks like the White House wasn't gonna, wasn't gonna weigh in on, on behalf of Bayer and Syngenta in this policy fight, but clearly other voices changed his mind.
Ken Cook: Yeah. And my colleague also, Brian Bienkowski for The New Lede works with Carey Gillam. He just won the North American Agricultural Journalists top award for news because of his study using the Freedom of Information Act to unearth just how many times Bayer Monsanto lobbyists met with the administration to argue for them to come back and come back, come home and stand for the companies and not for the, the victims of this exposure.
Chuck Benbrook: Oh my God. The, the degree to which Bayer and former Bayer people and people whose professional careers and livelihood has been dependent on Bayer and the other pesticide companies. I've never seen anything like it from the Secretary of Agriculture, Susie Wiles, the chief of staff, this major fundraiser, Brandon, somebody, the Florida guy.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: They all have deep ties into Bayer. This is how large corporations engage with government.
Ken Cook: That's how they get their way.
Chuck Benbrook: They establish long-term relationships with people of influence that they don't know exactly, I mean, who would've guessed that Brooke Rollins would be Secretary of Agriculture in 2026?
Ken Cook: No one in agriculture I guess, did.
Chuck Benbrook: No, nobody in agriculture. And you know, I think, you know, Brooke, Brooke, Brooke is doing a fine job on some issues. But, uh, she certainly is paying attention to her, her friends and colleagues in the Bayer world and the degree of influence that Bayer has now on this administration, I, I've never seen anything like it.
Ken Cook: It's shocking and, uh, you know, of course Lee Zeldin responded pretty favorably when the, uh, Attorney General, early in the administration came to him and said, here's our petition to you at EPA to, to intervene on behalf of Bayer and Monsanto and stand up for, for preemption of state law.
I think all of us were blown away by the executive order that invoked national security as yet another layer of defense. Look, let's think about the layers here. First of all, there's the proceedings in federal court where the solicitor general, the top trial lawyer for the Justice Department weighed in on behalf of Bayer and Monsanto.
Then you have this executive order that, hey, it's a matter of national defense that we keep, keep this stuff being produced. And then finally, we haven't yet heard what the administration will say, but I don't think it'll be a surprise — there's an effort in Congress to rewrite the law in favor of Bayer and Monsanto and lots of other pesticide companies to choke off any kind of state-based claims of harm and avenues for accountability.
So that's, that's really pretty impressive. Uh, we probably won't get to the prospect that a bad decision at the court or the passage of this bad amendment in the Farm Bill, the implications it will have for other pesticide litigation and other venues for holding pesticide companies accountable. But it's significant, right?
Chuck Benbrook: Yeah. You asked about the Durnell case. Yeah,
Ken Cook: Yeah. Uh,
Chuck Benbrook: John Durnell was a very typical urban user of Roundup. Bought it at, you know, local Lowe's or Home Depot, sprayed it around his yard again for several years. And was exposed to enough of it that the amount of damage to the DNA in these hematopoietic stem cells in his bone marrow, it, it created enough mutated, uh, cells that are incredibly elaborate and redundant immune systems just couldn't keep up.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: And sometimes a cancer will get ahead of the immune system when the immune system's fighting a urinary tract infection or an ear infection, or upper respiratory infection. Or sometimes people are put on immunosuppressive drugs 'cause they're having an a, an organ transplant. If there's some cancer cells in that person's body, they're gonna go wild.
So there, there's, there, cancer is such a complicated disease and there's essentially never or hardly ever one thing that causes a case of cancer. It's a series of things that unfold over at least a few years. Timing has a lot to do with it. John Darnell's case, uh, which I was involved with, I did an expert report and was deposed as, as part of the case — I didn't testify at trial. Uh, it, it reached a judgment. I think he was awarded 1.25 million, which was definitely on the low side.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: Monsanto didn't pick the Durnell case because of the, the large award. There were other reasons that they felt it would be a good vehicle to get these, these issues back in, in front of the Supreme Court.
So when, Bayer Monsanto literally engineered the conflict between the appeals courts. They paid people to do the appeals and, and rewarded either plaintiffs or attorneys for an outcome in those appeals that set up the request for the Supreme Court to take the case.
Ken Cook: Set up by a split between two districts.
Chuck Benbrook: Three.
Ken Cook: The third. Three, okay. All right. I know it's the one in Philadelphia, obviously the one in California, and then where was the third one?
Chuck Benbrook: Uh, it's in the southeast.
Ken Cook: Okay. The Supreme Court's looking at it and saying, “Hey, we're getting conflicting readings right from the courts right below us. So that's an invitation for us to step in.”
Chuck Benbrook: Right. But one of the reasons this is so controversial within the legal community is that Bayer Monsanto paid for lawyers to create the conflict in a way that's been exposed.
Ken Cook: How did they go about it? How did they do it?
Chuck Benbrook: What it boiled down to is that they promised both the attorneys and the person that was the plaintiff in the litigation that they would receive financial compensation, even if they settled their case.
Ken Cook: Wow.
Chuck Benbrook: So once the Supreme Court decided to take the case, I said to myself, I've been dealing with preemption since 1981, when I served as the staff director of the DOA subcommittee. And the number one issue that the industry wanted changes on in 1981, in George Brown subcommittee was preemption. And why?
Because the state of California, Florida, Massachusetts, and New York were starting to impose further restrictions, mostly on insecticide use because they didn't want farm workers to be poisoned in the field.
Ken Cook: Yeah. These were parallel to what was required on the label, right? Not
Chuck Benbrook: Correct.
Ken Cook: Not additional to or substitutes to. They were just parallel, like you have to do this too under state law.
Chuck Benbrook: Yeah, let's use wine grapes. A lot of insecticides are used in in wine grapes. And the company gets a federal label that it, it says how much can be applied, how many times, what kind of sprayer? What sort of PPE the applicator has to wear.
Ken Cook: Personal protective equipment, yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: But doesn't say much about a farm worker, maybe in the next field over, or a, a farm worker that's going into pr...
Ken Cook: It gets on them. It spray, it drifts onto them, or whatever. A family. It could be anybody.
Chuck Benbrook: And the federal label doesn't have any warnings about if you are working in and around a treated field, make sure that you don't get, get exposed. 'Cause this, this stuff will kill you.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: Federal labels were being approved that did not address in any way, shape or form many of the ways that farm workers were getting inadvertently, accidentally, exposed in places like California where you'd have a heavily sprayed grape field next to a strawberry field, next to a cauliflower field.
And you know, they're close enough together that some of the pesticides drift and people were getting badly injured, some people were being killed. So the states were requiring on state labels additional restrictions on when and where a field could be applied. And for example, the state of California wanted to put a sign on the corner of the field — this has been sprayed, stay out of the field for at least 24 hours.
And they wanted the signs to be in Spanish. What a radical idea.
Ken Cook: Of course.
Chuck Benbrook: Right. And this is what the pesticide industry at the national level, they didn't want states to be free to address these very localized and often really dangerous, high risk exposure scenarios. So they came to our subcommittee and and said, we want to cut back the role of states in pesticide labeling.
And states can't require anything more on their label than what the federal EPA did. And if a farm worker is injured and heaven forbid killed, they can't go into a state court and sue the company because they got sprayed from this application on the grapes and were exposed to enough to kill them. They couldn't bring litigation because the application was, complied with, what was on the federal label.
So what California was doing, they were adding additional requirements, including mandatory warnings. And so now the industry says, the argument behind the current effort, is that a farmer or a farm worker, or someone that is exposed to a pesticide in a state and is harmed. Either harmed economically, the pesticide killed their crop, killed their apple trees, damaged the paint on their Maserati, which was happening from some aerial applications in California, remember?
Ken Cook: Yeah, I do remember that.
Chuck Benbrook: You know, people were being harmed from legal, labeled uses of pesticides and, and because of state law, they would go into court and say the, you know, there was a failure to warn. But the pesticide companies want now the federal court system and the Supreme Court to say to the state court, you can't recognize a failure to warn claim unless the warning was on the federal label.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: And of course, pesticide companies, they're responsible for writing the labels and they resist.
Ken Cook: They don't wanna do it.
Chuck Benbrook: They don't want to.
Ken Cook: It'll hurt sales. It'll hurt sales.
Chuck Benbrook: It'll hurt sales.
Ken Cook: Yeah. You have a phrase in your brief industry backed by the Trump administration, I'm gonna say it again, backed by the administration that includes Bobby Kennedy. What they're basically saying is, we wanna make sure that this preemption exists, not just for the things we warn about on the label, but for anything we didn't think of.
Chuck Benbrook: Or didn't understand.
Ken Cook: Didn't understand. No science. But the, the states are producing the science, Heartland Health and Research Alliance produced vital information. New science that wasn't originally considered in the registration of the pesticide you write about in the brief, but there we are.
Chuck Benbrook: Let me just briefly describe part of the HHRA amicus brief that, I think's gonna catch the attention of the Supreme Court.
Ken Cook: Fingers crossed.
Chuck Benbrook: At the core of it, the pesticide industry, Bayer Monsanto wanna take states out of the pesticide regulatory business
Ken Cook: Out of the game. Totally.
Chuck Benbrook: Out of the game. What's going on right now involving another major Monsanto herbicide called Dicamba. Dicamba is one of the herbicides that Monsanto has developed a way to genetically alter soybeans and cotton plants so that not only can you spray glyphosate over the top of the crop, but you can also spray Dicamba.
And Dicamba is very helpful in dealing with some of the difficult to control broadleaf weeds that are really plaguing corn and soybean farmers around the country now.
Ken Cook: And that because Roundup no longer works, right,
Chuck Benbrook: Because it was used too heavily and irresponsibly. Yeah, because Monsanto fought putting any kind of resistance management provisions on the label because they were afraid that it might curtail their sales.
'Cause Monsanto is all about maximizing the sale and profits from its products and anything that gets in the way of that, what they call they, they want to preserve the ‘freedom to operate.’ The freedom to get labels and then to prevent any limitations being put on the existing labels.
Ken Cook: Freedom to operate. I can see the bald eagles and the American flag — unless the pesticide has killed the bald eagles. Of course, I can see the bald eagles in the American flag in the background. Freedom. Freedom to operate.
Chuck Benbrook: Dicamba has been a hugely controversial development, these Dicamba tolerant crops, because Dicamba is very volatile.
So farmers would spray Dicamba and kill the broadleaf weeds in the soybean field. But then the Dicamba, it volatilizes and goes up in the air, and then it moves with the, the, the wind and wherever it next rains or, or a little dew, it's gonna come back down to earth. Well, guess what? There's a lot of plants and trees and shrubs that when that Dicamba comes back down to earth, it's gonna harm it, if not kill it.
So all over the Midwest, there's been, this movement of Dicamba and, and another phenoxy herbicide, two four D, which is also very volatile. So the, the, the herbicides, they don't stay on the field where they sprayed, funny thing, especially in hot and hum weather, they volatilize go up in the air and move.
And so this has just created havoc in these Midwestern and southeastern states where there's a lot of genetically engineered soybeans and cotton grown and a lot of Dicamba being applied. So what have the states done? The states all now do supplemental labels. And what's in the supplemental labels? They have things like, you can't apply Dicamba after June 15th north of, of Highway five or in X County.
So all of the states now are doing supplemental labels for the Dicamba product. That's registered for over the top use in association with a genetically engineered soybeans and cotton. And these labels have some combination of geographic restrictions where they can be sprayed and what the cutoff date is — because this volatilization problem, it gets worse as it gets hotter.
So the farther into the summer, the worse the problem is. From the first year it was used when they could use it, Christ, they could apply it in August and they were having huge problems. Now most of the states don't allow it much after the third week in June.
And basically the farther south you go, the earlier that date is.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: So now there are three companies, Bayer Monsanto, Syngenta, and BASF, that have EPA approved Dicamba labels for applications on genetically engineered soybeans and cotton. These products are now approved in 34 states. So do the math.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: 34 times three.
So now states are reviewing and approving a hundred supplemental labels. A hundred supplemental labels. These are labels that the states have to do, have to apply, they have to enforce, and there's all kinds of crazy ass implications that nobody thought of. You know, somebody's farming in Missouri along the Iowa border, and they go and they buy some Dicamba in Iowa and it's got the label for Iowa and they bring it to Missouri, who's at fault.
Ken Cook: Yeah. Yeah. It's
Chuck Benbrook: unimaginable.
Ken Cook: One of the dynamics here, and you brought it to my attention as these cases were unfolding in this instance, this is a farmer versus farmer thing, right? This is where the plaintiffs were the farmers who were complaining that the drift of this dicamba into their fields that weren't dicamba resistant was costing them a lot of money, a lot of damage, and, and, uh, very upsetting.
Much as they care about their neighbors, they want their neighbors to be able to do what they want to do, like they want to do with their own land. But this stuff doesn't stay on your land. It doesn't stay on your crops. It moves.
Chuck Benbrook: Just think of the hypocrisy here where Bayer Monsanto, for its Roundup product is saying, we gotta cut the role of states out, because we don't like the fact that sometimes we get hauled into court, maybe have to compensate somebody that's been harmed by our product.
But it, but for our Dicamba product, oh, we like it that the states are doing like a almost a hundred supplemental labels this year to allow farmers to spray Dicamba on genetically engineered soybean and cotton,
Ken Cook: And then it falls on the farmers, if they haven't obeyed the label, it falls on them. Not on Monsanto. Is that right?
Chuck Benbrook: Well, that, yes, that, that is exactly correct. Now, if Monsanto has written a inaccurate or ineffective or ambiguous label, they also can become part of litigation. But the, the thing that, that just boils my blood about this, Ken, is the current Supreme Court precedents and direction to state courts about when somebody, that, that is defending a Monsanto or a Syngenta in state court.
Somebody has Parkinson's disease, somebody has non Hodgkin's lymphoma and has brought suit, and that person is seeking compensation from the company, the instructions to the judge on how to deal with a motion — to throw out the failure to warn cause of action. The basis of the litigation.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: Throw it out. You can't do it. That foundation, that interpretation of the FIFRA law was put in place in 2005 as a result of a bunch of cantankerous Texas peanut farmers.
Ken Cook: Yes.
Chuck Benbrook: These peanut farmers had bought a brand new Dow AgroSciences herbicide diclosulam. The trade name was Strongarm.
Strongarm, right?
Ken Cook: They always have the great trade names. Machete and whatever. Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: But there was one issue with Strongarm. Maybe more than one, but one issue that Dow knew about was that in soils, high pH soils, it didn't break down as fast as it normally did, and it was pretty persistent. So if, if a peanut farmer used it in the peanuts, it would work great, it would control the weeds. But then the farmer plants a cotton crop after the peanuts, the next year.
And holy shit, the, the Strongarm herbicide is still active and damages the subsequent crop. Well, that's what happened to this group of, of, I think there was seven or eight plaintiffs led by, the lead plaintiff was a, a guy named a farmer named Bates, and all they asked for was their losses to be covered. Which is the, you know, the amount of money that they paid to plant the subsequent crop and this, this kind of thing with, you know, carry over herbicide damage. Yeah. It, it was happening regularly all over the country.
And most of the time if it was a custom applicator, they would have insurance and the insurance would more than cover it. And sometimes the companies would kick in some of the money if it was a, a larger, broader adverse impact. But for some reason Dow decided that by God we're gonna fight this and try to get rid of this failure to warn cause of action.
And so Dow takes on this group of seven Texas peanut farmers takes on big Dow AgroSciences
Ken Cook: All the way to the Supreme Court.
Chuck Benbrook: Yeah. And wins.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: And wins. And so now American farmers read the, the propaganda put out by the Modern Ag Alliance and other front groups that are being financed mostly by Bayer Monsanto and Syngenta — that are the two multinational pesticide companies facing billions of dollars of costs from litigation over, in the case of Syngenta, Paraquat Parkinson's disease, and in the case of Bayer Monsanto, Roundup and Non Hodge's lymphoma.
They are desperate, desperate to find a way to limit their liability exposure. And let, let me at this point, make one other point that is really important. Why is the pesticide industry so determined to try to get this change in law put in place?
And there's really a very obvious answer. Science is catching up with the ability to link exposure to a given pesticide to damage to DNA or some marker of the evolution of a chronic disease, which then clearly increases the risk of some bad thing happening. Science is catching up on all of the instances where the pesticide industry covered up knowledge and evidence of harm and convinced regulators to say, yeah, it's okay.
We'll label that. That pesticide can be in broccoli. This pesticide can be in carrots. This pesticide can be sprayed all over rangeland in the West. And EPA made those decisions, because the companies had successfully kept the regulators from understanding what the companies already understood about how the pesticide can damage human health.
And the companies know that there are going to be more of these successful efforts by the pesticide industry to keep products on the market, for decades, in some cases, after the company knew it was causing significantly heightened risk of, in the case of Paraquat and Parkinson's disease, the predecessor companies to Syngenta, remember back in the day when we called them Novartis?
Ken Cook: Okay, I do remember. Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, we're going back, but in 1980s, Novartis sponsored cutting edge quality research on what Paraquat was doing in the human brain. And guess what they found? It was triggering damage to dopamine neurons. Completely consistent, and fundamentally part of the progression of damaged neurons to Parkinson's disease — in the eighties!
Ken Cook: Yeah. And another shout out to Carrie Gillum because she published something called the Paraquat Papers. They're on the The New Lede website right now. They were published by The Guardian as well, that again, once you lift this corporate veil and see what they knew and when they knew it, what they were talking about in memos and emails and other communications, they fricking knew.
And they have an obligation under law to let the government know and they didn't. And we know why they didn't. For all the reasons you just described, it's the beginning of the end for them.
Chuck Benbrook: And Ken, let, let me make really clear, 'cause I'm sure some farmers that do worry about access to Roundup are listening to this.
Monsanto knew that Roundup herbicides were damaging the DNA in stem cells in all of our bone marrow. They knew that by the early two thousands. They didn't have any tools to quantify exactly how big the increase in risk of non Hodgkin's lymphoma, multiple myeloma, leukemia, the blood cancers.Very important cancers.
They didn't have all the pieces of the puzzle put together like we do now, today.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: But they knew enough to say, let's put a warning on it.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: You know, if you're using this product a lot and use it over several years, take extra precautions to avoid exposures. They should have put a requirement for for on the label when you are handling and applying this product, wear gloves. I mean, how simple is that?
Ken Cook: How about a long sleeve shirt? How about long — no flip flops, right?
Chuck Benbrook: No flip flops. The Roundup non Hodgkin’s lymphoma litigation is unfortunately stuffed with incredible stories. There was a woman in Florida, she loved her backyard garden, especially her rose bushes.
She had an area in her backyard with her rose bushes.
Ken Cook: My mom and Aunt Ruth did too. I think you saw it one time too.
Chuck Benbrook: God bless them.
Ken Cook: Yeah. Yeah, that's right.
Chuck Benbrook: Been a long time since they left a stock.
Ken Cook: That's right. That's right.
Chuck Benbrook: So this woman, she used bark mulch under her roses, very proud of her roses. And then she had her lawn and she hated it when her lawn started to creep out into her bark mulch, which, yeah, don't we all tend to do.
Ken Cook: Don't we all? Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: So she devised a creative solution. She would have her little Roundup canister that she bought at Home Depot and the little electric sprayer on with shorts on and bare feet.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: And she would put her foot on top of the edge of the grass, on top of the edge of the grass and then spray the bark mulch with her foot catching the, the spray.
And she did that for several years. And guess what? She got non Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: I mean, people do kind of crazy things, but
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: When a, when a company tells people that their product is non-toxic, it's, it's all natural ingredients, biodegradable.
Ken Cook: You can spray out the window of a cab as you're on your way to the airport.
Chuck Benbrook: Right? Yeah. Right. And remember the ads for DDT with the kids in suburban areas?
Ken Cook: Yes, off course.
Chuck Benbrook: Of course. Walking behind the spray truck 'cause it looks like it's snowing. In an urban area.
Ken Cook: I did it in my suburban St. Louis neighborhood. Of course I did.
Chuck Benbrook: Yeah.
Ken Cook: Of course I did.
Chuck Benbrook: We all did. So what, what does DDT and Roundup glyphosate have in common? They have an extraordinarily high LD 50.
Ken Cook: The LD 50 is the amount that will kill half the animals in an experiment.
Chuck Benbrook: Exactly. LD stands for lethal dose. Dash 50 is 50% of the animals. So this is the
Ken Cook: Died during the study
Chuck Benbrook: Yeah. Right, right.
Ken Cook: It's not like this is, we wait around for them to get cancer. They're fricking dead.
Chuck Benbrook: Right
Ken Cook: In the cage.
Chuck Benbrook: Right, right. And so, you know, the, the, the LD 50 for glyphosate is like 4,000 parts per million. I mean, it's really high. Just the same as with DDT. I mean, you can stick your arm into a barrel of Roundup and pull your arm out and you're not gonna get sick. You're not gonna have symptoms, you're not gonna get a rash.
If you stick your little one finger just a little bit into that much Paraquat, you're gonna die.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: Or any of the high risk, uh, organophosphate or carbonate insecticide.
Ken Cook: Yeah. Yeah. It varies. Well, you've been very generous with your time, so I just want to ask you one more question and, and you know, again, we're, this is gonna stay with us for a while, depending, especially depending on where, where the Supreme Court goes down, depending on what happens with the Farm Bill next week and what, we don't have time to talk about that particular scenario, but you and I have been through dozens of Farm Bills it feels like.
But what do you think is at stake now? So politically, there are all kinds of questions now in the world of MAHA because they feel betrayed, and rightly so. They shouldn't have been surprised, but because they don't know all the history that we know, uh, they just assume when Trump said he was gonna do something about pesticides, and it sounds like you've, you've heard he was surprised at the preemption position the government took, uh, in the end too.
So there's that political element where we gotta get people to wake up to what's really going on. But then there's, there's the real possibility that if this decision goes the wrong way, and we've had some doozies on the environment from this court, right — that we could, we could really be in trouble.
We could really lose one of our few remaining avenues, other than buying organic food. But certainly for a lot of people being exposed outside the dietary exposure route, we, we could really be in trouble when it comes to protecting human health and the environment and all kinds of critters from pesticides.
But, but what, what's your sort of closing thought on all of this, Chuck? You, I mean, you, you and I go back decades, but you've been, you know, a, a, a leader on pesticide policy and regulation and obviously deeply involved as an expert in this litigation now also for decades. What comes to your mind that, that makes you most concerned if this goes sideways?
Chuck Benbrook: Really important, uh, question Ken and I, I, I think the answer is that right now, the, the only meaningful accountability and concern about coming forward and getting high risk pesticides registered for uses that are gonna result in a lot of, uh, human exposure is the, the risk of litigation. If that risk is taken away, then, right now, the, the pesticide industry has a very cozy relationship with the Office of Pesticide Programs.
Ken Cook: Longstanding very long, unfortunately, uncomfortably longstanding. I think, I don't wanna put words in your mouth, but, you know.
Chuck Benbrook: OPP started to go downhill by the late eighties, uh, and from basically the late eighties on, the ability of pesticide registrants to get their way with the Office of Pesticide Programs has steadily increased to, to the point now where they're, they're not really that concerned about getting their, their products on the market, and they're certainly not concerned about EPA taking a high risk product off the market.
I mean, look what happened just two weeks ago. Syngenta bailed on Paraquat before the EPA took it off the market.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: And what, why did Syngenta bail on it? Because they know they're gonna keep getting sued. It, it's, it's been banned in China, which owns Syngenta. You know, it's, it's just, uh, the, the lax approach of the US EPA and the Office of Pesticide programs about well documented, clearly hazardous uses of pesticides.
It, it's, it's, a travesty. And I think that farmers are starting to figure it out — because they look in their neighborhood cancer, this family, two cases of cancer, this family, three cases in this family.
Ken Cook: Yeah. Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: They can see that people are getting sick.
Ken Cook: Yeah.
Chuck Benbrook: And unfortunately we have big problems with how we grow food in this country, and then what we do with the food between when it leaves the farm and people eat it.
The concerns over ultra processed food are real. The health of the American public is a national disgrace right now.
Ken Cook: Yeah, for sure.
Chuck Benbrook: I think the public is about had it with it. And I think that the day is going to come, you know, in, in the next five or 10 years where there's going to be substantial changes in some of the laws and policies that govern agriculture and, and, and food safety and food quality.
We could have the most nutritious, delicious, diverse food supply in this country if we wanted to, but no. What do we have? We produce a lot of ethanol. We export a lot of food and we feed a lot of corn and soybeans to, to livestock and create unhealthy fats that keep us unhealthy. Our food and fiber system is seriously broken, and the, the, the time is, is, has come to fix it.
Ken Cook: Well, between your lips and God's ears, brother Chuck, I'm gonna end there and, and thank you for, uh, explaining all of this to me and to my, uh, audience and, and also for your decades of devotion, uh, intellectually and, um, devotion that comes from, from the heart. I know that firsthand, we'll come back when we find out how some of these deci, big decisions have come down.
The most momentous decisions really since the 1990, mid 1990s, Food Quality Protection Act and the National Academy, most momentous moment.
Chuck Benbrook: I, I knew you were gonna say that at some point.
Ken Cook: Yeah. We haven't agree. Had a moment like this and, um…
Chuck Benbrook: Yeah.
Ken Cook: We'll stick with it. Uh, Chuck Benbrook, thank you for joining and giving me another great episode.
Chuck Benbrook: Thank you.
Ken Cook: Thank you to Dr. Chuck Benbrook for joining me today, and thank you out there for listening. If you'd like to learn more, be sure to check out our show notes for additional links to take a deeper dive into today's discussion. Make sure to follow our show on Instagram @KenCooksPodcast. And if you're interested in learning more about ewg, head on over to ewg.org or check out the ewg Instagram account @EnvironmentalWorkingGroup.
Now, if this episode resonated with you, and I hope it did, and you think someone you know would benefit from it, send it along. The best way to make positive change is to start as a community with your community. Today's episode was produced by the extremely remarkable Beth Rowe at Mary Kelly. Our show's theme music is by Moby.
Thank you Moby, and thank you again out there for listening.
