A key paper on its safety from 2000 was retracted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46161125

Like the tobacco industry before them, a Monsanto employee proposed producing a scientific paper with outside scientists: “by us doing the writing and they would just edit & sign their names so to speak” — see https://retractionwatch.com/2025/12/04/glyphosate-safety-art...

> you can get cheaper Glyphosate from many different manufacturers. Which is great, because it means we can avoid the potentially-more-dangerous Roundup, and use the simpler base chemical instead.

Unspecified Glyphosate product isn't better because it's not Roundup. If some ingredient in Roundup is dangerous, let's drop the Glyphosate conversation and look for herbicides without that other mystery chemical.

It really seems like you're looking for a reason to justify Roundup as uniquely bad, in the face of evidence, with extremely vague statements.

I will never understand this bizarre obsession with gut flora. We don't know what is normal, what is a beneficial ratio or when a change happens if that is good or bad thing. No one besides the people who study these things should be much attention to gut microbiomes. We just don't have enough information to let this be an influence on decision making.

Anything that reaches the gut intact disrupts (ie: manipulates, interacts with, alters, stimulates or suppresses, selects) the gut biome. I'm not pushing back on you except to say that as a mechanistic axiomatic claim of harm, it's missing most of the evidence. You could be right, but you could also be wrong; what you've said so far can't possibly be dispositive.

AFAIK the preponderance of the evidence is that most "gluten sensitivity" is actually just a FODMAP sensitivity, which also interacts with the gut biome.

No, it isn't. What's your point?

Those aren't really great examples, considering that Arsenic and Asbestos have been known to be harmful for centuries/millennia.

Thalidomide never even made it to use in the USA.

Fluoride being good for teeth was discovered by fluoride naturally being in the water already

Can't speak for the other two, but I hope you're not basing your fears on stuff like that.

I mean, you can believe whatever you want to believe, and the EPA can be wrong, but "the EPA has been claiming X since 1991" is not a very powerful argument for "not X".

(There are mechanistic reasons to believe glyphosate is less harmful than other landscaping treatments; it has a fairly elegant mode of action.)

> there is no legitimate reason for preemption to apply to labeling laws (even as broken as California's labeling law is), as labeling a product a certain way is not a mutually-exclusive action.

That's not really what preemption is about. A major point of having "interstate commerce" -- actual products crossing state lines -- at the federal level, is to prevent states from enacting trade barriers.

Suppose California disproportionately has more organic food producers and other states make higher proportions of food products grown with glyphosate. California then passes a law requiring the latter (i.e. disproportionately out-of-state) products to carry a scary warning label based on inconclusive evidence. Are they trying to enact a trade barrier? It sure looks like one. Meanwhile if the stuff is actually dangerous then it's dangerous in all 50 states, so the warning label should either be everywhere or nowhere according to the evidence, right?

Relatedly, having dozens or (at the city level) hundreds of different sets of rules is also a kind of trade barrier. Some small business in Ohio is willing to ship nationwide but every state has different rules, they might be inclined to cut off everyone who isn't in the local area since that's where they get most of their current sales, but that's bad. So then there is a legitimate interest in being able to say the rules have to be uniform if the states start trying to micromanage too much.

The better way to do this would be to only apply the interstate commerce rules to actual interstate commerce. So they could preempt California from requiring labeling on products shipped from Ohio, or require specific federal labeling on the things that are, but only California gets to decide about the things that never leave California. A lot of states would then say you have to follow the federal interstate rules even if you don't cross state lines, but it would be their decision and some might not.

Apart from the health aspect, there is the thing were these GMOs are patented and the business model is one where farmers are not allowed to keep a portion of this years yield to use to seed for next year, but essentially get roped into a subscription model for the crops they plant.

Essentially turning

> You wouldn't download a car

into

> You wouldn't plant your seed for your crop.

Which is obviously absurd.

So while GM has enabled some pretty good things, it also comes with the same sort of intellectual property baggage that plagues many different areas of society, which on the face of it make some sense, but always seem to skew towards concentrating money towards those who already live a comfortable life, squeezing from those who have less to begin with.

I think that this will be material to me in the sense in which it resolves some questions about whether Oak Park, the ultra-blue inner-ring suburb suburb in which I live, can ban gas ranges, which I enjoy cooking on. I guess I think Bayer has the better case here.

In the message board controversy over glyphosate itself, I don't think this case has much to say. The state labeling regime was either preempted or not; that's a technicality of state and federal statutory evaluation. If the labeling regime is enforceable, it doesn't much matter whether it was about IARC classification or midichlorian counts. Strict liability is strict liability.

The substantive part of this case, whether glyphosate is an inherently dangerous or flawed product, was resolved by the trier of fact in favor of Monsanto.

A simpler way to say all of this: "the safety of glyphosate is not before this court".

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/13/micropla...

(This is a summary of a Nature Matters Arising article).

Bindweed is evil incarnate in plant form. Wouldn't wish that on anybody.

I think the fears about glyphosate resistance owes too much to antibiotic resistance, but I am not really sure it makes sense.

I suppose there's some regimen where you carefully monitor every plant sprayed with a weedkiller is monitored for survival and killed with fire if it survives, or some other extreme measure to be sure there are no survivors to develop resistance, but realistically the weeds are going to develop resistances over time.

And ... so what? The value of a weedkiller like glyphosate is using it to kill a lot of weeds in wide-scale agriculture. If the weeds develop a resistance to it, and we stop using it because it's no longer effective, we're not really in a worse position than if we never used it at all. It's not like there are some really bad weeds we need to save it to be able to combat.

That people would be on the whole less healthy had glyphosate not been on the market, because other herbicides, all of which were and are in common use, are worse.

It's not a complicated argument.

The alternative is mass starvation.