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 - --- MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager