Dear Editor,
It’s been quite the summer with all the celebrations, the drought, the bounty of produce at the markets, the heat, and all the uncovering of lies.
In August, Dwayne Johnson, a dying man in California, was given his day in court and was able to prove he was dying of a cancer caused by Monsanto/Bayer’s failure to warn the users of Roundup of its health dangers. Dangers which it had known about since it first went on the market. Bayer still claimed innocence yet is stock prices dropped by billions after the guilty decision.
Now Bayer and other pharmaceutical/Agri-chem companies have been told their neonicotinoid pesticides are being banned in Canada because they’re harmful to aquatic insects. Oddly, the beekeepers have been ignored for years about the harm these chemicals do to the bees, which pollinate one third our crops.
“Don’t ban them, we know how to use them” is still the cry from some farmers. “The size of our crop yields will be reduced.” As if size matters more than health safety.
“Don’t ban it, we know how to use it” was the plea of the American Medical Association in 1937 when cannabis hemp was being banned in the US. “Don’t worry, we can replace it with our drugs,” said the pharmaceutical companies. And they did. And now when recreational marijuana is becoming legal to grow outdoors, Health Canada is banning the sales of hemp flowers, since they’re high in pain-easing CBD. CBD will only be allowed to be sold by prescription.
CBD/hemp can’t get you high. It can even help those people on high-THC recreational marijuana “come down” from being “too high”. Yet there’s money to be made in pain relief. The profits for local farmers are being displaced by multinational pharmaceutical companies. These companies have known the benefits of hemp leaves all along and therefore helped get it banned back in the ’30s. These same companies will sell you drugs to ease the health symptoms their agri-chemicals, like Roundup, have caused.
The “we can’t do without it” claim for neonics brings forth the realization that agricultural innovation has been largely stifled by the reliance on chemical companies to do agricultural research. Colleges and governments and local farm groups used to creatively develop new ways to deal with regional and seasonal stresses and changes. Steadily, since WW2, they’ve been bought out by Big Pharma and their “Get Big of Get Out” reliance on expensive machines and chemicals.
Meanwhile, organic farmers do rely on creative innovation rather than chemicals, working with nature to stay in business. As it stands, Canadian farmers can’t supply all the organic food Canadian consumers demand. This demand has risen greatly due to cancer-causing Roundup/glyphosate having been found in significant amounts in nearly all conventional foods, even baby foods.
And in the world of politics, Mr. “Fake News” Trump has been outed by his personal attorney for buying and burying stories that were going to be published before the 2016 election in The Sun and tabloid newspapers. Stories that would have influenced the election. And the readers of those media won’t hear about what Trump did then, because The Sun and the tabloids still won’t tell their readers they’ve been paid “Hush money,” to the tune of a quarter million dollars, not to tell.
The press traditionally was at arms length from those in power and those vying for power. In recent years, big money has bought up one newspaper after another. They restrict which stories can be investigated and reported Without scrutiny, how can our “leaders” be accountable to the people? To democracy?
May your harvest be healthy and bountiful,
Robbie Anderman
Killaloe ON
