|
Tobacco Redux?
by Jack Kittredge
I was 19 years old in 1964 when Luther Terry, U.S. Surgeon General, warned the nation about tobacco. He released a historic study linking cigarette smoking to cancer and other serious diseases. The reaction was fast and furious. Legislation flew through both houses of Congress to require warning labels on cigarette packages and in tobacco ads. It went into effect the next year, in 1965. Cigarettes are still sold and smoked today, but nowhere nearly as widely, having declined among US adults by about 70%.
The industry had disputed such studies for over a decade, contesting their methodology and challenging the authors’ credibility. They even published a number of articles in scientific journals whitewashing smoking (which were later retracted, including ones on nicotine and liver disease, heart attacks, and diabetes). But the 1964 report was unequivocal, conclusive, and carried the authority of the highest health official in the U.S. government.
Such a precedent may seem inconsequential today, considering all the problems confronting us now. But to those millions of people who never took up smoking because of it, that firm action by the federal government was a life-saver. We are presented with a quite similar situation today.
According to a January 2 article in the New York Times, a 2000 study of the herbicide glyphosate has been retracted by the scientific journal that published it. Glyphosate is the active ingredient of the pesticide Roundup and in the study it was absolved of being a carcinogen. The paper went on to became the cornerstone of regulations that deemed the pesticide safe.
In recently retracting the study, though, the journal, Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, cited “serious ethical concerns” regarding the authors of it and indications (gained from emails later discovered during lawsuits) that they had received compensation for it from the weed-killer’s maker (before its recent sale to Bayer), Monsanto.
“This is a seismic, long-awaited correction of the scientific record,” said Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, Boston College’s director of the College in Global Public Health. “It pulls the veil off decades of industry efforts to create a false narrative that glyphosate is safe.”
The chemical is widely used in industrial farming and food production, leaving traces in bread, cereal, snacks and, most concerningly, is widely present in human urine. Many studies of midwestern farmers using it have shown an increase in cancers, as did reports emerging from Colombia after US spraying of glyphosate over thousands of acres of coca fields. In 2015 the World Health Organization classified it as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” The question confronting us now is: Shall our country ignore this long-standing corrupt effort (at great human expense) to deceive the public into using a toxic chemical, or do we speak up and say clearly how dangerous it is?
Many juries are now making awards to victims of cancer caused by glyphosate. As a result Bayer has been lobbying Congress to exempt them from responsibility for such damages. Last fall Bayer offered an amendment to a Congressional funding bill effectively holding them harmless, but its adoption was defeated last week by a concerted and well-organized consumer effort. Is the tobacco example actually going to be repeated?
The Supreme Court will shortly hear a case examining current law regarding this exact question: governmental shielding of a company from responsibility for its products. So the battle is not yet won. But the Congressional victory last week, and the presence of national health agencies which have flipped the food pyramid and called for us to eat real food instead of the highly processed stuff, gives us all hope. Perhaps we do still have the courage to see corruption and confront it.
|
