Pubdate: Wed, 15 Aug 2001
Source: St. Petersburg Times (FL)
Copyright: 2001 St. Petersburg Times
Contact:  http://www.sptimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/419
Author: Nancy Corson Carter
Referenced: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01/n1439/a01.html

THE PERILS OF POISONING

Re: Roundup works -- but too well? by David Adams, Aug. 6.

This is reminiscent of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962)! Like many 
scientists of integrity since then, notably Sandra Steingraber, author of 
Living Downstream: A Scientist's Personal Investigation of Cancer and the 
Environment (1997), Carson warned us of the enduring hazards of chemical 
assaults on the natural world. Carson documented that DDT used in the 
United States had poisoned animals and ecosystems as far away as the poles.

Now comes Roundup, which in overconcentrated doses kills Colombian drug 
crops as well as thousands of creatures, endangers human lives and spreads 
out via rivers into the vast Amazon basin. (Ironically, most of the 
targeted crops feed U.S. cocaine and heroin addictions.)

The United Nations Commission on Human Rights concluded in Nairobi this 
past May that living in a pollution-free world is a basic human right. The 
manufacturers of Roundup state on their product's label that "It is a 
violation of federal law to use this product in any manner inconsistent 
with its labeling." So why does the United States violate both its own laws 
and international environmental-human rights principles in Colombia?

Further, we have the gall to blame the peasants whose homes and fragile 
ecosystems we are destroying as "spreading a sinister campaign of 
disinformation." Rumors suggest that we are depopulating those areas so 
that we can take larger "crops" like oil, for example. Who's disinforming whom?

In this vastly interconnected world, we as American citizens must 
ceaselessly demand that our government and the free press tell us the 
truth. We cannot spread poisons, especially among neighbors, without them 
filtering back into our own food, into our own psyches and souls.

Nancy Corson Carter, St. Petersburg 
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MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager