Bayer’s Monsanto was ordered to pay more than $1.5 billion Friday over claims its patented weed-killer, Roundup, was linked to users’ cancer, Bloomberg reported.
James Draeger, Valerie Gunther and Dan Anderson were each awarded a total of $61.1 million in actual damages and $500 million each in punitive damages by jurors in state court in Jefferson City, Missouri.
The three people alleged that their non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas — a type of cancer that begins in your lymphatic system, part of the body’s immune system — were caused by years of using Roundup while gardening.
As a mod on a few garden and science subs at that time, they were pernacious and ethically inept. They would associate anything anti-pesticide or GMO with being an anti science quack. And they would dog pile on poor individuals expressing concern.
I had several debates with them, often reported them for brigading, and ultimately had to ban them.
Being anti-GMO is almost always anti-science quack. (Except if your complaint is about the patenting of the DNA) Pesticides are a bit more complicated because they are necessary for modern agriculture, but of course making a poison that only kills the things you want to kill has the risk if them killing more things.
Being blanket pro GMO is kinda nuts and can only come from a kneejerk against anti-science nuts.
There are some great GMO examples but also a lot of really bad ones, do you realise that the vast majority of GMO seeds have been modified not to use less pesticide but to make the crops resilient to the pesticides and allow them to use more? It allows them to absolutely flood the area with Monsanto products that all wash into the waterways and destroy ecosystems - and they don’t care because if people are forced to farm dead wasteland they’ll need loads of the chemical fertilisers they also sell…
Capitalism had a whole load of choices for how to use these new technologies, they could have chosen to help the environment, but the other option is fuck everyone and grab the money so of course they took that.