Round-Up Stopped Working, Let's Try Agent Orange Instead

Weeds! Anyone who digs in the earth fights them. Around my part of the world the two biggest problem weeds are Kudzu and Bermuda grass. For years I battled them the way most of us did; with chemicals like Monsanto's flagship product Round-Up. At first things went well. I sprayed, weeds died, but over time, the weeds developed immunity to glyphosate, the main ingredient in Round-Up.

At some point I realized that not only were chemical herbicides (and pesticides too) not working, it came to my attention that these products were far more dangerous to animals than they were to the plants I was trying to eliminate. It turns out that Monsanto, like most huge multinational money mills had actively sought to hide the dangers of their products from the public. I could go on about that, and the hazards of herbicide resistant seeds, but that isn't what I wanted to tell you about today.

It seems that the brain trust at the helm of Monsanto and other chemical giants want to turn back the clock, in typical conservative misguided fashion, and return to using even more dangerous chemicals such as the infamous 2,4-D, infamously used in Agent Orange during the Viet Nam fiasco.

Here's a snip from a blog post found at Mother Jones.

Monsanto's empire of Roundup Ready crops—designed to resist lashings of its own herbicide, Roundup—appears on the verge of sending the pesticide treadmill into reverse. As Roundup loses effectiveness, swamped by a galloping plague of resistant superweeds, farmers have already played the card of dramatically boosting Roundup application rates.

Now they're being urged to resort to an herbicide called 2,4-D that first hit farm fields in 1948, and that made up half of the formula for Agent Orange, the infamous defoliant applied to disastrous effect in the Vietnam War. Reports Southeast Farm Press:

2,4-D is coming back. What many might consider a “dinosaur” may be the best solution for growers fighting weed resistance today, said Dean Riechers, University of Illinois associate professor of weed physiology.

To be fair, 2, 4-D made up the less toxic half of the Agent Orange formula, according to thisBeyond Pesticides report (PDF) on it. The other half, known as 2,4,5-T, carried most of the dioxin contamination that made Agent Orange such a nightmare for everyone exposed to it in Vietnam.

But 2,4-D isn't completely off the hook for its role in Agent Orange. Beyond Pesticides reports that "several forms of dioxin have also been found in 2,4-D," citing both EPA and State of Washington studies. And 2,4-D has quite a dossier of destruction in its own right. Beyond Pesticides points to  both epidemiological and lab-based evidence linking it non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and other cancers. It's also an endocrine disruptor, Beyond Pesticides reports, meaning it can "interfere with the body's hormone messaging system and can alter many essential processes." It can also act as a mutagen, or a  "substance that induces genetic mutations." Here's Beyond Pesticides:

Workers who apply 2,4-D had a higher number of white blood cells with multiple nuclei than people who were not exposed. In rabbits, 2,4-D exposure resulted in unusual numbers of chromosomes in brain cells. Genetic problems like these can have further consequences in terms of cancer and reproductive problems. 

These chemicals - all of them - should have been banned from production years ago. People who manufacture, distribute, and possess them should be jailed the way we do dope dealers. Glyphosate and 2,4-D are far more dangerous than any weed ever grown or smoked by a hippie at a drum circle. We've got our priorities all wrong and someday very soon there' going to be a high price to pay for our arrogance.

To learn more about Monsanto and the dangers of genetically modified crops pose to our future, check out this excellent DVD, The World According to Monsanto. For further study, I also recommend Jeff Smith's Seeds of Deception.