Great Barrington — The Triplex will be hosting a free screening of the 2022 documentary “Into the Weeds” on Tuesday, August 20, at 7 p.m. The showing is part of The Triplex’s environmental documentary series and will include a panel discussion with scientists, activists, and members of Berkshire County’s agricultural community.
The documentary is about one man’s legal fight against Monsanto (now Bayer) for the harm caused by the herbicide Roundup, which contains glyphosate as its main ingredient. The company started manufacturing the herbicide in 1976 for weed control.
Benicia, Calif., resident Dewayne “Lee” Johnson sprayed hundreds of gallons of Roundup over the course of many years as a school groundskeeper. In 2014 Johnson was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and in 2017 he received a terminal diagnosis from his doctors. Johnson alleged that his exposure to Roundup caused his non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and he went on to sue the company in 2016.
In 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans.”
In August 2018, Johnson was awarded $289 million in damages by a jury in San Francisco that found Monsanto did not adequately warn consumers of cancer risks due to using Roundup. After several appeals, the award was reduced to $21 million, but Johnson’s lawsuit opened up a floodgate of other lawsuits against Bayer for the herbicide product.
Eventually, in June 2020, the company agreed to pay $10 billion to settle lawsuits over Roundup and its harmful effects on people.
The documentary chronicles Johnson’s lawsuit and his health struggles, along with the health struggles of other people and the herbicide’s effects on the environment.
Investigative journalist Carey Gillam, who wrote the 2018 book “Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science” and the 2021 book “The Monsanto Papers: Deadly Secrets, Corporate Corruption, and One Man’s Search for Justice,” is one of the interviewees featured in the document. She formally worked with Reuters for 17 years and is now the managing editor at the environmental journalism initiative The New Lede.
“Michal Freedhoff [who is the Environmental Protection Agency’s assistant administrator for the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention], spoke not too long ago at a conference I attended in Washington, D.C.,” Gillam told The Berkshire Edge. “She said that while the EPA can do more [about glyphosate], she said that the EPA’s hands are tied to a degree by the way the laws are set up. Our whole regulatory structure in the United States is set up so that you have to prove something is not safe before it can be banned, as opposed to Europe and other countries where they have a more precautionary view. In other countries, you have to prove that [the product] is safe to get it on the market. In America, there is an infrastructure in place with our regulatory system that is set up to favor the companies. The regulatory system is not set up to favor health protection.”
Gillam said that there are many reasons why America’s regulatory system is set up in this way. “It’s been put in place by these companies that benefit from it and the lawmakers who reap the financial contributions and the support from these companies,” Gillam said. “It’s lucrative for a lot of companies and a lot of politicians, and not so good for the people who are exposed to these chemicals.”
Despite the lawsuits, the company’s settlement with Roundup users, and documented health and environmental effects from Roundup use, the EPA states:
In February 2020, after receiving and considering public comments on the glyphosate proposed interim decision, EPA published the interim decision registration review decision (ID) for glyphosate. As part of this action, EPA found that there are no risks of concern to human health when glyphosate is used in accordance with its current label. EPA also found that glyphosate is unlikely to be a human carcinogen.
In February 2023, State Rep. Carmine Gentile (D – 13th Middlesex District) introduced a bill in the State House that would regulate the use of glyphosate in the Commonwealth. Gentile explained that he has been engaged in trying to get glyphosate use regulated for several years. “The company still sells Roundup to pesticide companies, and the farmers are still using it,” Gentile said. “A few years ago, I went out to a cranberry bog, and a former legislator, who is now a lobbyist, came over to me and said, ‘Oh, you know, all the cranberry growers use glyphosate.’ We’ve been growing cranberries in the Commonwealth for centuries long before glyphosate was invented, so it’s not impossible to produce all of these foods without the use of glyphosate.”
Gentile said that the bill is currently with the State House’s Ways and Means Committee. “It has been a long struggle,” Gentile said. “The literature [about glyphosate] is such that it’s not a clear and compelling argument, insofar as Bayer and Monsanto have been very successful in muddying the waters.”
Jennifer Baichwal, producer and director of “Into the Weeds,” said she used Gillam’s books and research for the documentary. “I felt that there had to be a historical record, much like Carey’s books, of corporate malfeasance,” Baichwal said. “[The documentary] captures the kind of pressures that come to bear on farmers who employ an industrial model [to farming], and also the threat to biodiversity that pesticides bring. Roundup is the most widely used herbicide, and it’s an obvious sort of place to start when we’re thinking about the way that we interact with our natural environment. The trial [surrounding Johnson’s lawsuit] uncovered so many instances of corporate misconduct, I felt that it had to be put on the record.”
Gillam said there were over 100,000 lawsuits in the United States filed against Monsanto over Roundup. Baichwal said that she did find people who filed lawsuits against the company who were willing to talk to her for the documentary. “But what I was trying to look for was a variety of instances to show that [the use of glyphosate] affects everyone,” Baichwal said. “It can have an effect in a residential and commercial context. But what is it doing when it is being sprayed on thousands of acres of land?”
Visit The Triplex’s website for more information on the free screening of “Into the Weeds.”
