by Carey Gillam
John Sanders worked for thirty years managing weeds in orange and grapefruit groves in Redlands, California, before he developed NHL. Frank Tanner owned a landscaping business in California and started using Roundup in 1974; he was diagnosed with NHL after years of spraying glyphosate. Both are suing.
Orange County, California, resident Goldie Perkins sued Monsanto in July 2016, claiming the non-Hodgkin lymphoma she was diagnosed with in July 2014 was caused by exposure to Roundup products that she started using in the 1970s. Perkins echoed others in her assertion that scientific fraud helped get and keep glyphosate products on the market for decades.
From all over the country, from small towns to large cities, people are alleging connections between disease and glyphosate-based Roundup and say they were intentionally led to trust in the safety of a product that was not truly safe. “Monsanto assured the public that Roundup was harmless. In order to prove this, Monsanto championed falsified data and attacked legitimate studies that revealed its dangers,” states one lawsuit, filed by Enrique Rubio, who claims he got cancer after nearly twenty years of regular exposure to Roundup while working in strawberry and vegetable fields in Oregon, California, and Texas. “Monsanto led a prolonged campaign of misinformation to convince government agencies, farmers, and the general population that Roundup was safe,” his lawsuit states.11
Monsanto fought to have the cases thrown out, but as of this writing they are moving forward, and legal experts warn that glyphosate-related liability litigation could persist for decades. Lawyers working on the cases say they believe they will prove that Monsanto has deliberately concealed information about the dangers of its herbicide, an implication that, if proven, could reverberate around the world, given the global pervasiveness of the chemical. The lawyers and many observers familiar with glyphosate’s history expect the litigation to rival mass tort actions seen over harms associated with dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), asbestos, and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).
Monsanto argues that forty years of studies show glyphosate to be extremely safe and not cancer-causing. The company has asserted that IARC’s findings were based on “junk science” and that politically motivated scientists have unfairly maligned the chemical.12 Monsanto hired its own team of experts in 2015 to review the safety of glyphosate and said they found no cancer links.
But IARC was not the first to link glyphosate to cancer. The EPA’s own scientists had the very same concerns back in the mid-1980s. A 1985 internal memo details how agency scientists themselves classified glyphosate as a possible human carcinogen. It was six years later, after extensive input from Monsanto, that the agency switched its tune and declared instead that it found “evidence of non-carcinogenicity for humans.”13 The change was made over the objections of some peer review members involved in the classification.
By the mid-1990s, Monsanto was facing accusations about Roundup’s safety by New York’s attorney general, Dennis Vacco, who grew up working on his family’s 3,000-acre farm raising snap beans and Concord grapes. Vacco sued Monsanto for allegedly using “false and misleading advertising,” including assurances that Roundup could safely be used in areas where children and pets play.14 The attorney general also challenged Monsanto for using phrases like “You can feel good” about using its glyphosate-based herbicides because they were “practically nontoxic.” Monsanto did not admit wrongdoing but agreed to pay $50,000 and to stop making such advertising claims in New York. Advertising in other states was not affected.
Aaron Johnson, a farmworker from Hawaii who was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2014, said he relied on those claims of safety during the roughly twenty years that he spent living and working amid the pineapple, macadamia, and papaya farms of Pahoa, Hawaii. “They would say it was safe as table salt. That was a common belief,” recalled Johnson, who is one of the plaintiffs in the Roundup litigation. He loved his life on the island, surfing and hiking and taking a morning jog through the fields before work each morning. When the sickness set in, Johnson said, he was blindsided by the news that he had blood cancer. He initially was told he had but three months to live. Johnson spent the next year undergoing chemotherapy and bone marrow transplant treatment before being declared by doctors to be in remission in 2015. He now tends to a small orchard of his own, hand-weeding and shunning any chemical herbicides, especially Roundup.
“I think that they’ve known since the ’70s this stuff can cause cancer. And now, on the scale that it has been distributed and used … this molecule is everywhere, in our food, our water,” Johnson said. “They say it can be found in every person. As time goes on we’re going to find out that it is a lot bigger than people can even imagine right now. All for profit—all for the sake of making billions a year off this one product. I don’t understand how they’ve been able to get away with it.”15
Legal experts say it will take much more than heartrending stories to demonstrate that Monsanto bears responsibility for the disease that tore apart so many lives. Proving that Roundup caused an individual’s cancer, and that the company knew of and covered up evidence of carcinogenicity, is a big legal hill to climb. Monsanto claims the best science proves the safety of its herbicide and argues that regulators around the world are on its side. With more than $15 billion in revenues in 2015 and a long track record of victories in court battles over other complaints about its practices and products, Monsanto has been undeterred by the mountain of lawsuits. Its arsenal to combat adversaries will become even stronger if a planned merger between Monsanto and Germany’s Bayer AG is completed.
Still, the dozens of attorneys pushing the cases forward say they have strong evidence that Roundup is just the latest example of a pattern by Monsanto of making false safety claims and covering up evidence about a dangerous substance. Indeed, the Roundup litigation closely mirrors courtroom battles Monsanto fought for years involving the polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, it once manufactured.
Plaintiffs in those cases claimed PCB exposure caused them to fall ill while Monsanto hid the risks. Monsanto claimed, as it has done in the Roundup cases, that plaintiffs could not definitively link illnesses to PCB exposure. But the court-ordered discovery process required Monsanto to turn over internal documents that demonstrated the company was aware of health and environmental hazards even as it worked to keep the public in the dark and manipulated scientific studies to downplay the risks of PCB exposure.
A St. Louis, Missouri, jury in May 2016 ordered Monsanto and affiliates to pay $46 million in the cases of three people from Alaska, Michigan, and Oklahoma who said that exposure to PCBs gave them or their loved ones non-Hodgkin lymphoma. As with glyphosate, Monsanto was the primary U.S. maker of PCBs, until Congress outlawed them in 1979. And like glyphosate, PCBs were once used prolifically, for everything from industrial equipment to food product packaging. Hundreds of other PCB cases have been tried or are progressing through courts. Monsanto still faces legal claims by state officials in Washington who allege the company’s production of PCBs contaminated more than 600 sites around the state, polluting waterways as well as soil and air. The state contends Monsanto hid its knowledge of the dangers of PCBs for years.
In 2003, Monsanto and a company it spun off called Solutia, along with a company called Pharmacia, through which Monsanto operated briefly as a subsidiary, agreed to pay roughly $700 million to address claims by more than 20,000 plaintiffs over PCB contamination in Anniston, Alabama, where the company operated a PCB manufacturing plant.16 Studies linked PCBs to diabetes and liver disease in the Anniston area, though Monsanto had said for years that PCBs were not endangering public health.17
Some scientists and environmental activists who have long followed the trails of chemical pollution believe the evolution of glyphosate also mirrors that of DDT, a common pesticide most famous for its ability to wipe out malaria-carrying mosquitoes. DDT was also used in agriculture and in residential areas, and, like glyphosate, it was viewed for decades as a near-magical chemical before it fell f
rom favor amid evidence of dire health and environmental consequences. DDT was award winning—the 1948 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller, who discovered its insecticidal properties in 1939. The dangers of DDT took years to fully emerge, although—like glyphosate—DDT raised early red flags with scientists. After decades of use, DDT was found to be an endocrine disruptor, and, like glyphosate, it was classified as “probably” carcinogenic to humans by the World Health Organization’s cancer experts. Scientific research also linked DDT to miscarriages, liver damage, and other health problems, and by 1972 the pesticide once declared a “benefactor to all humanity” had been banned for most uses. Still today, regulatory tests routinely find traces of DDT residues in food.
Don Huber, professor emeritus of plant pathology at Purdue University, believes that glyphosate may be even more toxic than DDT. “Future historians may well look back on our time and write about us … how willing we were to sacrifice our children and jeopardize future generations based on false promises and flawed science just to benefit the bottom line of a commercial enterprise,” he said. “We need to recognize what the concerns are, what’s happening, and then we need to change.”18
While there is great debate over the safety of glyphosate, there is little doubt about its pervasiveness. By 2013, glyphosate use was so widespread that U.S. government researchers were documenting it in our air and waterways as well as in human and animal urine, including that of dairy cows. An analysis of state water agency data by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group found glyphosate in tap water in at least six states, flowing through water utilities that serve more than 650,000 people. People getting their drinking water from utilities in Bakersfield, California, and New Port Richey, Florida, were among those exposed.19 Glyphosate residues have also been found by various organizations in a range of commonly consumed products, including wine, cereals, and snacks. Although everyone who eats risks glyphosate exposure, agricultural workers who toil in fields where the pesticide is used face the greatest exposures.
Harrington Investments, a California-based investment advisory firm that focuses on socially responsible investments, believes Monsanto can and should do more to reassess glyphosate’s impacts. John Harrington, who leads the firm, has filed multiple shareholder resolutions asking Monsanto’s management team to conduct fresh studies on glyphosate’s consequences for both people and the environment, but each request has been rejected.
“They have a long history of egregious behavior,” Harrington said about Monsanto. “They operate with no regard for the potential harm that may result from their actions—profit is their sole objective. Monsanto is the quintessential example of a corporation that exists exclusively to maximize materialistic self-interest, regardless of the consequences to society.”20
Jack McCall’s death was felt throughout his small community of Cambria, an old mining town at the mouth of the Santa Rosa Creek, midway between the bustling cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles. The community, home to about 6,000 people, is dotted with vineyards and wineries, verdant pastureland, and rolling hills of brilliant yellow flowers, and it is blessed with easy access to the rocky beaches of the Pacific Ocean.
Everyone in Cambria knew Jack, it seemed. He worked for years as a town postman to help make ends meet, volunteered in a local church, and was a fixture at the local farmers’ market, where he offered fresh fruit for sale or traded avocados for vegetables to take home for dinner.
Longtime family friend and neighbor Shanny Covey said that while Jack was worried about other pesticides, he believed that glyphosate was safe. He used it over and over and recommended it to Covey and other friends and farmers. He was so confident of the safety of his fields that he would take his grandson Wyatt for tractor rides around the farm. Three years before Jack’s death, the McCall family dog, Duke, developed lymphoma and died at the age of six. Duke had typically romped alongside McCall and played in the areas where McCall used glyphosate to treat weeds. But no one suspected at the time that the weed killer could harm the dog.
When Jack was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2015, his oncologist warned Teri not to try to research the particularly fast-moving and rare form of NHL Jack had—anaplastic large-cell lymphoma, or ALCL. The prognosis was so dire it would be better for Teri not to know. Teri did the research anyway.
Some of what she learned, she already knew: ALCL revealed itself slowly at first, with symptoms easy to discount—fever, backache, loss of appetite, and fatigue. It could start in the skin, or the lymph nodes, or in organs anywhere in the body. And it could kill.
“I saw that it was aggressive, but I still was determined that we were going to lick it,” she recalled. “He wanted to talk about making plans for me, for the family, in case he didn’t make it. But I avoided that. I always thought there would be more time. I didn’t know he was dying.”
It was Christmas Eve 2015 when Jack was admitted to the hospital for what would be the final time after he suffered a massive stroke. Cancer had spread from an initial lump in his neck throughout his body, and he was weak from chemotherapy and other treatments. His body simply could not take any more. Family and friends gathered at his bedside on Christmas Day to say their goodbyes before Jack slipped into a coma that he would not come back from. He died the day after Christmas when Teri allowed his doctors to remove life support. “I wanted to tell him not to leave me, but I couldn’t do that to him,” Teri recalled. “I couldn’t make it harder for him to go.”
Paul McCall, who stepped in to run the farm in his father’s place, was the first to make a connection between his father’s disease and Roundup, stumbling onto IARC’s findings during an Internet search. He read about the strong links found between glyphosate and NHL and read more and more until the rage and grief overwhelmed him. It was too late to help his father. But Paul decided there would be no more Roundup used on the farm. He started warning friends and neighbors about the herbicide as well. He knows his suspicions don’t prove the chemical is the killer, but he refuses to take what he sees as more risks. “I threw it all out. I just use dish soap mixed with some vinegar and salt now. It works just as well,” he said. “It’s no secret Roundup is bad for you. They got rid of DDT. They need to get rid of this too.”
CHAPTER 2
An Award-Winning Discovery
It’s unclear if Swiss chemist Henri Martin ever fully understood the billion-dollar baby he brought into the world when he discovered what would eventually become known to scientists as N-(phosphonomethyl) glycine, or glyphosate.1 After all, Martin was not looking for an herbicide; he was looking for a drug. It was 1950, the dawn of an era in which efforts to address global health issues were evolving into fresh profit centers that spawned waves of new drug offerings. General scientific research, particularly biological research, was expanding; enhanced mechanization meant faster and more robust production of new drugs; and the race was on to find the latest and greatest magic potion. Martin was working at the time for a small pharmaceutical company called Cilag, which would be acquired by the burgeoning giant Johnson & Johnson Company in 1959.
During long hours in his lab working with different compounds, Martin synthesized a few grams of glyphosate, but the scientist could not come up with any pharmaceutical use for the odorless, crystalline-like substance, and it was ultimately shelved alongside numerous other intriguing but uncertain projects. It would be almost another two decades before any use for glyphosate was found.
After Johnson & Johnson bought Cilag, it sold off several of its research samples, including its glyphosate work, and, like an unwanted stray, glyphosate was sold again by a company called Aldrich Chemical. Stauffer Chemical Company was perhaps the first to find value in glyphosate, identifying it as a chemical chelator, something that could bind with minerals such as calcium, manganese, copper, and zinc. But it took Monsanto Company’s chemists to unlock the magic of the molecule as a powerful, and ultimately highly profitable, herbicide.
> The glory for that discovery would go to John Franz, a zealous young scientist who would later tell interviewers that he had known he wanted to be a chemist from the age of ten. Franz joined Monsanto in 1955 as his first job after obtaining a doctorate in organic chemistry at the University of Minnesota. He worked on an assortment of projects for Monsanto, which at that time was primarily a maker of industrial chemicals. Franz’s work included research into polymer flame retardants.
In 1967, Franz was a fresh transfer into Monsanto’s agricultural division, working alongside Phil Hamm, head of the company’s herbicide-screening program. The company had been testing different compounds as potential water-softening agents when it found that two molecules showed some herbicidal activity. Weed killers, as well as other pesticides, were in high demand at the time—part of an exploding technology-driven modernization of agriculture and food production. Hamm assigned Franz to analyze these intriguing molecules more closely, and the young scientist ultimately synthesized derivatives into a chemical that could act as a powerful plant growth inhibitor. Glyphosate was considered a novel and highly effective new herbicide. When sprayed on a weed, it travels to the roots and disrupts a critical enzyme produced by plants and microorganisms known as 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate (EPSP) synthase.2
Plants require this enzyme to produce the building blocks they need to grow. Without them, the plant withers and dies. Even a few drops of glyphosate can kill an otherwise healthy plant within a few days. In addition to its effectiveness, glyphosate was determined by Monsanto’s scientists to be much safer and better for the environment than other herbicides in use. The enzyme glyphosate disrupts was not known to be present in mammals or birds, so while it was toxic to plants, it was safe for people and animals, according to Monsanto.