RFK Jr. The Defender - Monsanto's Lies with Carey Gillam

Carrie Gillum has spent 25 years researching the food and agricultural and agrochemical industry, spending most of her career with the international news agency Reuters. She is now emerging as a modern-day Rachel Carson with two books that reveal decades of corporate secrets and deceptive tactics used by powerful pesticide companies, including the global giant Monsanto. Her books and her ongoing reporting have led her to become recognized as an international expert on corporate control of agriculture and the health and environmental impacts of a pesticide-dependent food system. She was asked to testify before the European Parliament in 2017, and has been an invited speaker at the World Forum for Democracy in Strasbourg, France. She s keynoted events all over the country, all over many countries, on almost all of the continents. Her 2017 book, Whitewash: The Story of the Weed Killer Cancer and the Corruption of Science, won the 2018 Rachel Carson Book Award and the Gold Medal for Outstanding Work from the Independent Book Publishers and many other awards. Her second book, The Monsanto Papers, Deadly Secrets: Corporate Corruption and One Man's Search for Justice, was released on March 2nd of this year, and it s called "The Monsanto Papers: A Man's Quest for Justice." In this episode, we re going to talk about both of them, and how they are different from each other, and what we ve been able to learn about the relationship between science and corporate greed in the pesticide industry, and the corrupt practices that have been going on since the early days of the herbicide-causing industry. We ll be talking about how the Monsanto Papers and The Monsanto are different than The Weed Killer are written by the first book, "Whitewash" by Rachel Carson, and why they are so different from the second book "Deadly Secrets" is so much better than the first "The Weed Killer: How to Protect Your Health from Pesticide Poisoning: The Truth from the Truth from a Weed Killer". And we ll talk about why we should be worried about pesticides and herbicide use in the first place, not just in our food, but in our bodies and our bodies. and why we need to be careful about what we put into our bodies, not in our mouths. the more we eat in the food we eat. We ve all got to choose what we eat, and we have to eat it in our children s bodies, so we should all be careful what we grow in our heads and our lungs.

00:00:00.000 Hey, everybody.

00:00:00.000 I have an old friend of mine on today, and I'm really excited about her.

00:00:05.000 Investigative journalist Carrie Gillum has spent 25 years researching the food and agricultural and agrochemical industry, spending most of her career with the international news agency Reuters.

00:00:17.000 She is now emerging as a modern-day Rachel Carson with two books that reveal decades of corporate secrets and deceptive tactics. 0.52

00:00:26.000 My powerful pesticide companies, including the global giant Monsanto.

00:00:31.000 Her books and her ongoing reporting and her writing have led her to become recognized as an international expert on corporate control of agriculture and the health and environmental impacts of a pesticide-dependent food system.

00:00:45.000 She was asked to testify before the European Parliament in 2017 She has been an invited speaker at the World Forum for Democracy in Strasbourg, France.

00:00:57.000 She's keynoted events all over the country, all over many countries, on almost all of the continents.

00:01:06.000 Gilliam's 2017 book, Whitewash, the Story of the Weed Killer Cancer and the Corruption of Science, won the 2018 Rachel Carson Book Award and the Gold Medal for Outstanding Work from the Independent Book Publishers and many other awards.

00:01:22.000 Her second book, which we were going to talk about today, we're going to talk about both of them, was released on March 2nd of this year, and it's called The Monsanto Papers, Deadly Secrets, Corporate Corruption and One Man's Search for Justice.

00:01:36.000 And it has been described by a reviewer as blending, quote, science and human tragedy with courtroom drama and the style of John Grisham.

00:01:46.000 That book is about the Monsanto trial, in which I was privileged to be part of the trial team in that trial, and I spent a lot of time with Kerry in San Francisco and Oakland, and particularly with Lee Johnson's trial.

00:02:01.000 You know, let's go right into the government industry corruption and what You know, we were able to get with the Monsanto papers where we really got a glimpse of what was happening, of this extraordinarily corrupt relationship between particularly the EPA Pesticide Division.

00:02:21.000 And it turns out that the head of that division, Jess Rowland, was actually for many years just representing Monsanto's Interest, the inside of that agency.

00:02:34.000 Let's talk about that.

00:02:36.000 Let's start by talking about Jess Rowland and all the things that you talk about in your book.

00:02:42.000 Oh my gosh, yeah.

00:02:43.000 Jess Rowland, right?

00:02:45.000 My first book, when people ask me about the differences between my first and second book, in some ways there aren't many, in other ways they're incredibly different.

00:02:54.000 But the first book was really about the deception that Monsanto engaged in, deceiving Regulators, the EPA, as well as consumers and scientists and everyone really that they were trying to promote this product to.

00:03:08.000 But it also was about deceptive tactics taken by the regulatory agencies and in many cases by scientists and people in the scientific community.

00:03:17.000 Jess Rowland, as you point out, it's hard to really know because we haven't been able to talk to Jess and the depositions that he was involved in don't seem to have revealed very much.

00:03:29.000 But what we see in the internal documents that have come out from the EPA and what came out through litigation is Both through Freedom of Information Act requests and through discovery requests, was that Monsanto thought that this gentleman, Jess Rowland, who was leading the cancer review assessment within the Office of Pesticide Programs at the EPA, was considered a very close friend of Monsanto's.

00:03:55.000 And they talk in numerous emails about how he can be helpful to them and he can help them with their defense of glyphosate.

00:04:03.000 There are emails where they're talking about just helping them, wanting to help them kill a review of glyphosate safety by a different agency, not the EPA, but a different federal agency.

00:04:17.000 And an email where a Monsanto executive says, you know, just told me if I can kill this, I should get a medal.

00:04:24.000 And ultimately, the EPA was successful in at least delaying this review by this outside agency.

00:04:32.000 But there are many, many, you know, as I detailed in my first book, going back to the 1980s, there are emails and communications buried in the archives of the EPA, that I guess are not buried anymore, that show that the agency was working very hard to put Monsanto's interests above the interests of public health.

00:04:52.000 During two of the trials, and we're not allowed to use that memo, but one of the trials that actually allowed us to use it, and I think it It's one of the reasons why we got $2 billion judgment from the jury, because they understood that Monsanto is not just lying to the public about the health effects of Glyphus,

00:05:13.000 it was also knowingly and purposely subverting democracy and destroying the careers of scientists who tried to tell the truth.

00:05:25.000 They were gross writing scientific publications And then paying prominent scientists to sign those publications.

00:05:33.000 And we got all of those emails.

00:05:36.000 Yeah, definitely.

00:05:37.000 I mean, as I said, there's a long history of this.

00:05:40.000 The information that came out just even before Discovery, in my first book, Whitewash, this was before the first trial, before a lot of these Discovery documents came out.

00:05:50.000 And these were just based on what I was able to get through Freedom of Information.

00:05:53.000 And it laid a clear path That from the 1980s, Monsanto had a lot of control and influence With the EPA and other regulatory agencies, the FDA, the USDA, as well as European regulatory agencies.

00:06:11.000 And I don't think Monsanto is unique necessarily in that respect.

00:06:16.000 You see that play out with the different companies, Dow, for instance, and DuPont and other very powerful and influential companies that have a lot of money to throw around in D.C., I'm sure you've experienced that in many different areas that you've looked into as well.

00:06:32.000 It's very hard for anyone really to challenge these companies and the record certainly does not show that EPA put up much of an effort to delve into The true safety profile of these products.

00:06:46.000 I mean, one thing we learned, a lot of people, I guess, in the scientific community understood this, but the rest of us really got to understand that the EPA doesn't even require any independent long-term carcinogenicity testing of the Roundup products or these products that are out on the market.

00:07:05.000 So formulated Roundup or Ranger Pro or these other chemicals that you might be picking up To use around your lawn and garden are being used on golf courses and school playgrounds.

00:07:17.000 The EPA doesn't require testing on those actual products for cancer risk or other human health hazards.

00:07:25.000 They look at the active ingredient, glyphosate, they require Monsanto or other registrants to submit an array of scientific studies that delve into the safety of this active ingredient, but they don't for the formulated product.

00:07:40.000 Which contains other ingredients.

00:07:42.000 And what scientists have found over the years is that these formulations can be quite a bit more dangerous, much more toxic, because there's an enhanced synergistic effect when you mix these with other things, these surfactants and other chemicals.

00:07:57.000 And this has been a big problem with Roundup.

00:08:00.000 And the EPA still, to this day, doesn't require these long-term tests on these formulated products.

00:08:07.000 That was one of the issues that we tried to get in front of the jury, and I think we did that successfully because, as you say, the EPA had a bunch of tests that looked at glyphosate alone, but Monsanto doesn't sell glyphosate alone.

00:08:23.000 It sells it blended with a lot of other chemicals, including, as you point out, surfactants.

00:08:30.000 The purpose of the surfactant is to help a chemical Infiltrate and permeate the plants, but it has the same impact on human beings.

00:08:42.000 So if you get the formulated product, the Roundup, it has the surfactant, which is escorting essentially the chemical glyphosate through your skin and into your system, and that's its purpose.

00:08:56.000 And it's far more dangerous with that surfactant than it is alone, but the EPA allows the company Just test the glyphosate, the active ingredient, without actually testing what Roundup does to people.

00:09:14.000 And the few tests where people have tested Roundup show that it's far more toxic in the formulation than it is when glyphosate is alone.

00:09:24.000 Yeah, definitely.

00:09:25.000 And in fact, in Europe, the surfactant that Monsanto was using for many, many years, the POEA surfactant was banned in Europe because it was found to be so dangerous.

00:09:37.000 Now, Monsanto, you know, we even have emails where Monsanto is talking about this ban, this upcoming ban on the surfactant.

00:09:45.000 Wanting to spin that, wanting to make sure people don't see that because of a human health hazard, but because of other reasons.

00:09:52.000 There's so much information that's come out over the years.

00:09:54.000 And I wrote the second book because while the first one focused on the whitewash or the cover-up basically of the science, it was both a cover-up of science that showed harm and a perpetration of deception in the scientific community, putting out these ghost-written studies, like you mentioned.

00:10:14.000 And employing these front groups and this whole array of tactics to try to convince the world that this product not only is safer than any other herbicide that you could use, but was safe enough to be It's put directly on food crops.

00:10:28.000 And that was a huge thing, but we should go back to that in a minute.

00:10:32.000 But I want to say my second book, this book about the Johnson trial, I really wanted to write that because that's about the impact, right?

00:10:39.000 Or the consequences of the deception.

00:10:41.000 And Lee is only one man suffering from cancer, but there are so many, you know, millions of people suffering from cancer, over 600,000 people, right?

00:10:52.000 Every year die from cancer just in the United States.

00:10:55.000 And approximately 40% of men and women in the United States are expected to get cancer in their lifetimes, according to the National Cancer Institute.

00:11:04.000 It's just unbelievable that we are being told that we need to accept and live, learn to live with cancer and And get different treatments and have our body parts cut off and get radiated when we know that pesticides and chemicals and environmental toxins are big contributors to cancer.

00:11:22.000 And so I wanted to tell the story of Lee Johnson and what happens when you have a company as powerful as Monsanto that is perpetrating this fraud upon the public that this product is so safe that you can use it everywhere.

00:11:35.000 It can become ubiquitous in our air and our water and our food and found in our own urine and our blood serums.

00:11:41.000 We can spray it around school playgrounds.

00:11:43.000 We can spray it directly on our food and everything will be just fine because everything isn't just fine.

00:11:48.000 And so that's what I'm hoping to show readers in this book, The Monsanto Papers, is the story of Lee Johnson, who you got to know, and his struggle to survive cancer, but also to hold Monsanto accountable.

00:12:00.000 So it's a different kind of book and a different kind of story, but I'm hoping it's more personal, I suppose.

00:12:06.000 People often pay more attention, you know, if it's a personal story.

00:12:09.000 I'm so glad that you wrote this book about Lee Johnson, because that was really one of the pieces of, I won't say dumb luck, because there was consideration.

00:12:19.000 Because at that time, when we started the trial, there was about 14,000 clients.

00:12:24.000 We had to figure out which one to push to the front of the line.

00:12:29.000 And there were many reasons to push Lee, because his situation was so dire.

00:12:37.000 But he just turned out to be an incredible witness and a very, very sympathetic plaintiff for the jury.

00:12:46.000 Yeah, Lee's story really does tug at the heart.

00:12:48.000 He was brought to the forefront of the litigation and became the first person to go to trial against Monsanto because his doctor said, you know, it looks like you have 18 months left to live.

00:13:01.000 And this helped get him a preference trial granted by the judge in the case.

00:13:07.000 But, you know, Lee's father, two young boys, and when he grew up, he didn't have his father in his life, and he struggled quite a bit as a young man.

00:13:17.000 But in his midlife, then he was doing really well and really enjoyed his job as a school groundskeeper and was making good money and taking care of his wife and his two kids and Really, I was struck getting to know him and his devotion to really trying to be there and be present and be involved and be a good dad to these boys.

00:13:38.000 So, you know, being told that he was going to die before they were, you know, even in their teens, before they were grown, really was just heartbreaking for him.

00:13:47.000 And I've gotten to know him quite a bit and putting this story together and telling his story in the book and He's a remarkable man.

00:13:55.000 He just essentially decided, not only was he going to take on Monsanto and beat him, but with the help of a few really talented attorneys, but he wasn't going to die, is what he's told me a few times.

00:14:07.000 And he is still out there kicking around, even though he's suffering incredibly and still trying to seek treatment.

00:14:14.000 But so far, he's beaten that diagnosis and beaten the odds.

00:14:18.000 Talk about his relationship with his wife, because that was...

00:14:22.000 The two of them are so adorable together.

00:14:24.000 Yeah, Araceli is just a really amazing woman, too. 0.65

00:14:28.000 She's a little bit younger, quite a bit younger, I suppose, than Lee.

00:14:31.000 He's just the love of her life, and the thought of losing him has been incredibly painful for her.

00:14:37.000 And they actually fell in love at first sight.

00:14:41.000 They saw each other in a classroom at community college, and he knew at that moment that he was going to try to marry her.

00:14:49.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:14:50.000 That's how they describe it.

00:14:52.000 She took one look at him and, you know, that was it for her, I guess.

00:14:56.000 And he, as I said, he was a little bit older and he already had a child before with another woman, but really, you know, wasn't, had never been married before.

00:15:06.000 And Araceli was the one for him.

00:15:09.000 But they've struggled, you know, especially with his cancer and disease.

00:15:12.000 He's a really proud man and the loss of his income, the loss of his physical abilities, being so sick has really put a strain on their marriage as well.

00:15:21.000 It's hard to see, you know, up close and personal how cancer ravages not only the individual, but also the family.

00:15:28.000 And that's what you see in the story of the Johnson case.

00:15:31.000 He won his case against Monsanto and the jury unanimously Decided not only that Monsanto was to blame, but indeed their glyphosate-based herbicides caused his cancer, but that he was due $250 million in punitive damages because of the extent and the egregiousness of Monsanto's conduct in hiding the risks.

00:15:54.000 But because of some really interesting, I guess, aspects of California law, that judgment was cut significantly to $20.5 million ultimately.

00:16:07.000 Talk a little bit about the lawyers, about my amazing partners in this case, particularly kind of serendipity about what happened to Mike Miller at the beginning of the case.

00:16:19.000 Yeah, I mean, this story, again, watching it all come together, I knew I had to write a book about it because it was just like watching a movie kind of unfold, right?

00:16:30.000 You know, you had Lee Johnson, this very interesting, you know, sympathetic character suffering this really horrible type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma that manifests on the skin.

00:16:40.000 So his tumors and his pain and his suffering is all seen on his face and his arms and his legs.

00:16:46.000 It's just, it's brutal.

00:16:48.000 His body was literally covered with these postulating lesions.

00:16:55.000 And as you said, he's a very proud man.

00:16:58.000 He loves swimming.

00:16:59.000 He stopped swimming because he was concerned that other people wouldn't want to go in a swimming pool after he'd been in it.

00:17:07.000 He said he felt sorry for his wife having to sleep in the same bed with him.

00:17:12.000 Just an incredibly brave, brave man who never complained about anything.

00:17:19.000 Yeah.

00:17:20.000 I visited him in his home multiple times and traveling.

00:17:24.000 And when he gets up from bed, you know, there's blood on the sheets and on the pillow where the wounds, the open lesions, the cancerous sores on his, on his head and his body have opened up and bled at night.

00:17:36.000 He can barely have anything touch his skin because it just, it falls away at the slightest touch.

00:17:43.000 He showed me a lesion on his foot at one point.

00:17:47.000 And I, I just, I cried.

00:17:49.000 I couldn't believe a person could be alive, and I was looking at a hole in his foot that went down to the bone.

00:17:57.000 It's been an unbelievable situation that he's been dealing with.

00:18:01.000 In terms of the lawyers, yeah, I mean, the first lawyer that he connected with, or the first firm, was the Miller Firm out of Virginia, a really aggressive plaintiff's firm.

00:18:12.000 But they had never taken on a pesticide company.

00:18:15.000 And this is Mike Miller, and he's an old Southern guy, and he's kind of gruff, and he's got a real Southern charm about him, but he's also, you know, takes no prisoners.

00:18:25.000 And, you know, once he decided to take on Monsanto, he decided he was going to win, and he put millions of his own money, dollars, and the firm's money really into This case and building it over years through discovery and expert witnesses and research.

00:18:41.000 So you had Mike, and he looked forward to bringing this case to trial.

00:18:45.000 But just the trial was supposed to start in June, and he wanted to take his boys, his own family, on a Memorial Day weekend getaway.

00:18:55.000 And they went to the coast, and he was going to go kiteboarding, kite surfing, which is what he loves to do.

00:19:02.000 I'd take the address.

00:19:03.000 Yeah, and had this just terrible accident where the rigging on his gear malfunctioned and he slammed into the pier at a high rate of speed.

00:19:13.000 And, you know, it was a miracle that he survived.

00:19:16.000 He had so many broken bones and collapsed lungs and, you know, was just really beat up that they rushed him to the hospital.

00:19:24.000 And he was in there saying, still saying he was going to, he was going to take this case to trial.

00:19:29.000 And of course he couldn't.

00:19:30.000 So at the last minute, literally almost at the last minute, they brought in this young whippersnapper, I guess is how I see him, Brent Wisner, who really never tried a big case like this before, a young guy in his 30s, and he was brought in.

00:19:46.000 To work with Dave Dickens from the Miller firm and take this case to trial.

00:19:50.000 They didn't want to delay.

00:19:51.000 They didn't want to leave and miss his chance.

00:19:53.000 It was quite theatrical.

00:19:55.000 Brent was an actor when he was a child.

00:19:57.000 He was still a little bit of acting.

00:19:59.000 And he sure did that in the trial.

00:20:01.000 He was amazing.

00:20:02.000 He's amazing.

00:20:05.000 He reminded me of Jonah Hill.

00:20:07.000 And he has this very, very kind of buoyant...

00:20:11.000 Personality that I think really connected with the jury, and I don't think anybody could have tried that case better.

00:20:17.000 The weird thing was, immediately after Mike got injured in that terrible accident, we had a call from him at Bob Hedlund with Brent on the call, and Mike was saying to Brent, you know, Brent had been working on the case for a year, and he said, you're gonna have to take over A lot of the litigation responsibilities because I'm out, but his partner, Tim Litzenberg, was on the call and was going to lead the litigation.

00:20:46.000 During that phone call, Tim Litzenberg had a grand mal seizure and just disappeared from the phone call.

00:20:53.000 And then, you know, the next day we learned that Tom Hedlund and Brent was going to have to lead the litigation.

00:21:00.000 Because the Miller firm was, you know, really behind the eight ball.

00:21:03.000 Yeah, dropping like flies.

00:21:05.000 You know, I described that scene in the book where Dave is on the phone and Tim is in there in the office with him.

00:21:12.000 And Dave describes seeing Tim start to wobble a little bit and lean.

00:21:16.000 And then all of a sudden he's going down and hits his head on the corner of the desk.

00:21:20.000 And Dave is just like, what?

00:21:23.000 You know, we've just lost Mike Miller in this accident.

00:21:26.000 And now Tim is going, what is going on?

00:21:28.000 You know, as I said, it was like a movie, the way this played out, I think.

00:21:32.000 And of course, Tim now is in prison, which was another interesting turn that had nothing to do with the Johnson case, but played out later.

00:21:41.000 It's been a really interesting cast of characters to watch and to learn from.

00:21:46.000 I spent a lot of the time in the book trying to also share with readers sort of what I found it really fascinating myself to delve more deeply into the court system and how it works because even though I've been a reporter for 30 years and I've covered numerous court cases,

00:22:13.000 I learned so much really watching and learning and Trying to research how this all works, the good, the bad, and the ugly, you know, how the sausage is made in these very big cases.

00:22:24.000 You know, I think there's a lot of debate in Washington, obviously.

00:22:28.000 It's been there for many years about trying to rein in, should the plaintiff's bar be reined in, these personal injury attorneys.

00:22:34.000 There's a lot of discussion about exploitation of people and ambulance chasing and And I certainly see an element of that, I think, looking into this a little bit deeper.

00:22:46.000 But I also came to understand so clearly that without the Miller firm and the Baum-Hendland firm and the work that you do and others, these companies never get held accountable.

00:22:59.000 The regulators aren't doing it.

00:23:00.000 The lawmakers aren't doing it.

00:23:02.000 It's really in the hands of lawyers who are willing to put their reputations on the line and their money and their time.

00:23:09.000 And their lives, you know, it takes weeks, months, years away from their personal life to try these cases.

00:23:16.000 It's not a perfect system, but it's really all we have, and thank God we have it.

00:23:21.000 As you point out, the attorneys, the firms that are bringing these cases oftentimes are betting their entire existence on a specific case.

00:23:33.000 They'll put five, ten million dollars into a case, and if they don't win that case, The firm could be bankrupt or in terrible trouble.

00:23:41.000 I think there were at least two firms in the Monsanto litigation that if we had not won those cases, that those firms would have probably been out of business and the attorneys who were running those firms would have probably been personally bankrupt.

00:23:57.000 Yeah, no, I've talked to a number of them involved in the roundup litigation and they were mortgaging houses and taking out new business loans and A lot of law firms, there's a whole hedge fund investor scheme and program that's out there for investors to invest in this sort of litigation.

00:24:16.000 Again, I don't think it should be that way.

00:24:18.000 We should have a system where companies that engage in wrongdoing and market harmful products are regulated more tightly and are held accountable through our existing laws and systems of justice, but that isn't the way it works.

00:24:33.000 So you have to have this system Where you have these firms who are wealthy, quite wealthy, and can take on these cases, or you never get justice for people.

00:24:43.000 You're right.

00:24:44.000 I mean, millions of dollars just for the database alone, that the discovery documents, millions of pages of discovery documents to maintain that and to use the technology and the artificial intelligence that's necessary to be able to go through those and Find the relevant pieces of information that you need to make that case.

00:25:04.000 That's over a million dollars a year for that database alone.

00:25:07.000 It's a big money game and it's unfortunate.

00:25:10.000 There are a lot of the plaintiffs that I've talked to in this roundup litigation, there are now, what, 100,000 or so people that sued Monsanto, alleging that these herbicides caused them to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

00:25:22.000 And a lot of them have been getting settlement payouts or being offered settlement payouts now.

00:25:27.000 Bayer, which bought Monsanto, After losing three trials, the Johnson trial and then Harding and Pilliad, and the last one, Pilliad, with the $2 billion verdict, Bayer decided to settle these cases and has offered around $10 billion to spread among all of these people.

00:25:44.000 But what these plaintiffs are finding is, you know, they don't wind up with very much once the lawyers get paid and insurance gets reimbursed, if there is, and taxes, if it's structured in a way that they have to pay taxes.

00:25:57.000 And a lot of them are very disappointed.

00:25:59.000 Again, it's an imperfect system.

00:26:02.000 Even Lee Johnson has expressed some disappointment.

00:26:05.000 When you're told you're going to get $289 million, and then you get $20 million less taxes and lawyers fees and all that sort of thing, it's a disappointment.

00:26:15.000 It's not a perfect system.

00:26:17.000 There's really probably no way to adequately compensate people for the suffering that they undergo when they are faced with cancer, and especially terminal cancer.

00:26:26.000 Thank God we have these lawyers who are trying to do this work.

00:26:29.000 What's next for you?

00:26:32.000 I hope never to write another book about Monsanto.

00:26:34.000 I'm looking at different chemicals actually right now.

00:26:38.000 Paraquat is another one.

00:26:39.000 These all sound so nerdy, right, to talk about glyphosate or paraquat.

00:26:44.000 Paraquat's another herbicide though that there's a real scientific consensus now that exposure to paraquat contributes in a great degree to the development of Parkinson's disease.

00:26:54.000 Parkinson's disease is on the rise.

00:26:56.000 There are Cases that are being brought around the United States now that could rival, could grow to be as large as the Roundup litigation by people alleging that their exposure to Paraquat herbicide has caused them or their loved ones to develop Parkinson's disease.

00:27:12.000 You know, that's on the radar screen.

00:27:14.000 And there are more Roundup trials scheduled.

00:27:16.000 There's another one July 19 out in California that's scheduled right now, and another one scheduled in September.

00:27:23.000 BEAR keeps trying to settle these.

00:27:25.000 The judge, the federal judge, most recently, when Bayer tried to put forward a proposal that would shut off future cases, essentially, kind of put a clamp on future trials, keep people from being able to seek punitive damages in any future roundup trials.

00:27:42.000 The federal judge denied it, you know, and said, we see why you want to do this.

00:27:46.000 You've lost three trials.

00:27:47.000 Looks like the weight of scientific evidence is favoring the plaintiffs right now, and we see why you want to cut this off, but, you know, we're not going to help you do it.

00:27:55.000 Bayer now has said that they're going to consider taking Roundup off the residential market in the U.S. So I'm still writing about that and just really trying to keep people abreast of the dangers of these different pesticides and how we need to look at the risks as well as the rewards and help keep us all safer, help keep our kids safer.

00:28:15.000 The irony is that farm workers are probably suffering more than home gardeners from Monsanto, but we Represented almost exclusively home gardeners because you can isolate glyphosate and the impacts on glyphosate.

00:28:33.000 If you're a farm worker, you handle 20 different kinds of neonicotid pesticides and all of these other pesticides.

00:28:40.000 And it's hard to say that your non-Hodgkin's lymphoma came from the Monsanto if the other side can come in and say, well, you sprayed all these other different pesticides.

00:28:51.000 We really, the groups that we were representing were mainly home gardeners who could testify that the only chemical that they had and never had contact with was glyphosate.

00:29:02.000 Yeah, someone asked me that just earlier this week, actually.

00:29:06.000 Why are we not seeing a lot of farmers in this litigation?

00:29:10.000 And that's the exact reason.

00:29:11.000 Farmers are typically not using just one pesticide.

00:29:14.000 They're typically using a lot of different pesticides if they are conventionally farming, if they are using pesticides.

00:29:21.000 So, you know, they may be exposed to atrazine and clopirifos and paraquat, as well as glyphosate, dicamba, 2,4-D, a whole array of these chemicals.

00:29:29.000 And it's important to know, though, that if farmers are using them, we're all exposed too.

00:29:34.000 These are, there are residues commonly found.

00:29:38.000 I was just looking at the most recent FDA report.

00:29:41.000 312 different pesticides found on thousands of food samples looked at by the FDA.

00:29:48.000 More than 50% of the samples that they looked at contained pesticide residues, chloropolis, Chlorpyrifos, known to be Damaging the children's brains is right up there at the top.

00:29:58.000 Glyphosate was one of the most prevalent found in our foods, found in air, water.

00:30:03.000 As I said at the beginning of our conversation, there's a prevalence of these pesticides in our environment now, and it's incredibly hard to avoid them, particularly glyphosate, which is sprayed on so much of our food.

00:30:14.000 It's important, I think, that we all are aware of the risks and that we can, if we're concerned, we can make choices to limit our risk, hopefully, and to let our policymakers know that we want Better protection, better public policies, more stringent regulation.

00:30:30.000 This is all really important if we want our kids to have a healthier future and their kids and their kids and their kids and so on.

00:30:37.000 I mean, it's important for people to know if you're eating bread, if you're eating anything with corn in it, it's in your wine, it's in your children's breakfast cereals, it's in your beer.

00:30:49.000 It's ubiquitous now in the environment.

00:30:52.000 You really have to go out of your way to eat food that doesn't have it.

00:30:54.000 And we were able to sue on one illness, which was non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, because the science had matured on that.

00:31:04.000 But there's all kinds of illnesses that Clearly, they're being aggravated by glyphosate.

00:31:11.000 A lot of the neurodevelopmental disorders that we're seeing, the gluten allergies, which were coterminous with glyphosate, many kinds of non-alcoholic fatty liver cancer, which we're now seeing in children for the first time in history.

00:31:27.000 And the culprit is almost certainly glyphosate and many, many, many other injuries and illnesses that we're seeing in our children and in adults.

00:31:36.000 Yeah, definitely.

00:31:37.000 I was just preparing a presentation, actually, to talk to a group of environmental doctors in the next few days and just re-looking and looking at some of the new literature.

00:31:47.000 And, you know, it really is just starting to stack up to a really worrisome situation with glyphosate because it isn't just cancer, as you said.

00:31:55.000 There's a lot of research now that non-alcoholic fatty liver disease ties there.

00:31:59.000 You're seeing liver disease in animals that are fed these crops with glyphosate residues in them.

00:32:05.000 And a lot more evidence starting to show up that glyphosate is an endocrine disruptor, which, you know, these EDC chemicals are particularly worrisome because they interfere with the hormones in the body.

00:32:17.000 And that can play out a whole array of ways, right, affecting your immune system, but also reproductive problems and things like that. 0.99

00:32:25.000 So it's probably been a really, really bad idea to spray this chemical all over, you know, soybeans and corn and The sugar beets and alfalfa that the animals eat and even wheat.

00:32:41.000 And barley and soy and everything.

00:32:45.000 What Monsanto would say is the world can't survive without life.

00:32:50.000 Well, that's what they say.

00:32:53.000 There really isn't any sort of literature out there that supports that that wasn't generated by Monsanto.

00:32:59.000 We have an abundance of corn.

00:33:01.000 I guess there are so many different ways to argue that, but one thing I could say is we have over a billion bushels of corn and soybeans right now in ending stocks in the U.S. This is a data point that our USDA tracked.

00:33:14.000 Over a billion bushels of corn every year that we don't use.

00:33:17.000 We don't use it in ethanol.

00:33:18.000 We don't feed it to livestock.

00:33:19.000 We don't sell it overseas.

00:33:21.000 We don't feed it to starving people.

00:33:22.000 It's extra.

00:33:23.000 It's stuff we can't get rid of.

00:33:25.000 And yet this is what Monsanto is pushing is let's grow more corn.

00:33:29.000 Let's grow more soybeans. 0.97

00:33:30.000 We need to feed the world.

00:33:31.000 The world has enough corn and soybeans and sugar beets and wheat and cotton and canola and all these other things that glyphosate is designed to be sprayed with.

00:33:40.000 The reason that you have food insecurity and scarcity in a number of countries and regions around the world has nothing to do with the lack of chemicals.

00:33:47.000 It has everything to do with infrastructure, political upheaval, distribution resources, transportation, a whole lot of different factors that our United Nations has looked at.

00:33:57.000 And the United Nations has studied this issue in depth and has said repeatedly, we don't need Pesticides in these prevalent ways that we're using them to feed the world.

00:34:08.000 And they called for a new treaty among countries to reduce pesticide use because the risks so far outweigh the rewards.

00:34:18.000 And you have a number of farmers around the U.S., a growing number of farmers, as well as food companies and grain handlers and others, that are recognizing not only the human health implications but the environmental health implications that come with an overuse of glyphosate and other pesticides and they're looking and doing and investing in what we call regenerative agriculture or more sustainable farming practices where you don't use as many pesticides or you don't use them in the ways that

00:34:48.000 you were before you don't use them at all and they're finding that their yields are matching or in some ways beating Or these crops that are being grown with pesticides.

00:34:58.000 So there are rewards, obviously, with pesticides.

00:35:01.000 If there weren't, farmers wouldn't have been using them.

00:35:03.000 These companies wouldn't have been making billions of dollars.

00:35:05.000 But the risk reward ratio, the calculus, has swung way out of balance.

00:35:11.000 And if we don't get it back in balance, restore it, our kids are going to have a very dark and unhealthy future.

00:35:17.000 We're already seeing that play out right now.

00:35:19.000 One of the things we're seeing is that glyphosate not only poisons the plants, but it destroys the soil.

00:35:26.000 It destroys these very rich ecosystems that are critical for food productivity.

00:35:31.000 And the long-term injury from glyphosate actually is correlated with a decline in per acre production all over the world.

00:35:40.000 There's a really wonderful movie that I know you've seen, which is called Kiss the Ground.

00:35:46.000 Everybody's seen that, haven't they?

00:35:48.000 Yeah.

00:35:49.000 One of my favorite documentaries.

00:35:51.000 Can you talk about what consumers can do to protect themselves and leave on a positive note just for two minutes or so?

00:36:00.000 Okay, let me ask you.

00:36:02.000 Because all I've done is lived a dark and...

00:36:06.000 This is the doom and gloom show.

00:36:11.000 We have a lot of moms who get this podcast who are worried about chemical exposures to their children, and a lot of their children already have sensitivities.

00:36:20.000 What can consumers do to avoid glyphosate and these other pesticides in their foods?

00:36:26.000 Yeah, well, it's a good question.

00:36:28.000 It's pretty hard to do, obviously, but the easiest answer, I guess, that What is most obvious also is eat organic.

00:36:36.000 Glyphosate and these other synthetic pesticides are typically not allowed, you know, under the organic standard for production of organic fruits and vegetables and all these different foods.

00:36:46.000 So that's one way to reduce it.

00:36:48.000 There's a study out of California that came out in 2017.

00:36:52.000 A teen, I believe it was, that showed that you can drop your glyphosate levels in your urine pretty dramatically and pretty quickly by switching to an organic diet.

00:37:00.000 So there have been a number of studies out there that show that you really can reduce your exposure if you really pay attention to the types of foods that you're buying and feeding your family.

00:37:10.000 Gary, thank you so much for joining me.

00:37:12.000 Gary's book is The Monsanto Papers.

00:37:15.000 Please go to Amazon, go to Barnes& Noble, even better, and buy your copy of it.

00:37:21.000 Monsanto Papers.

00:37:23.000 Let's drive it up on the bestseller list.

00:37:24.000 While you're up there, get a copy of my new book, which is going to come out on July 20th, The Real Anthony Fauci.

00:37:31.000 We've got to drive that onto the bestseller list.

00:37:34.000 So please order from Barnes& Noble your pre-production copy.

00:37:40.000 Carrie, you're one of my great heroes.

00:37:42.000 Thank you so much for what you're doing.

00:37:44.000 Carrie is now at Writes Now, right?

00:37:46.000 U.S. Right to Know.

00:37:48.000 Yeah, a little tiny nonprofit trying to pull all these documents and data together and do Freedom of Information Acts and then requests and then share them with reporters and anybody who's interested.

00:37:58.000 So yeah, thank you, Bobby.

00:37:59.000 Thank you for having me.

00:38:00.000 And I need to get Bobby's book.

00:38:02.000 I'm excited about that.

00:38:04.000 I didn't know.

00:38:04.000 I didn't know he was writing that.

00:38:06.000 So yeah, we'll make sure.

00:38:09.000 Okay, thank you.

00:38:10.000 Thank you, Gary Gellin.

00:38:12.000 Thank you.

00:38:13.000 All right.

00:38:13.000 Have a good day.

00:38:14.000 Have a good week.

00:38:16.000 Keep slugging.

00:38:16.000 You too.

00:38:17.000 All right.

RFK Jr. The Defender - June 10, 2021

Monsanto's Lies with Carey Gillam

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