New Study Finds Exposure to Glyphosate Leads to Depression, Chronic Disease

As a lawyer, RFK Jr. won $78 million judgment against Monsanto

By Liam Sturgess, The Kennedy Beacon

In early August, the journal Environmental Research published a new study that revealed more ways than previously known in which the toxic chemical, glyphosate, has contributed to America’s increasing chronic disease problem.

As highlighted by Sustainable Pulse, the Taiwan-based researchers demonstrated, “an astonishingly strong link between severe depression, cognitive decline and exposure to the world’s most used herbicide, glyphosate.” The scientists studied a representative cohort of American adults using data collected in 2013-2014, and discovered “a significant negative correlation between urinary glyphosate levels and cognitive function test scores.” 80.4% of the population they studied had detectable levels of glyphosate in their urine.

This is just the latest in a long string of revelations about the negative health effects caused by glyphosate, the active ingredient in the infamous herbicide known as Roundup, brought to market by agrochemical company, Monsanto. It is also an example of the corporate malfeasance that presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been fighting against for decades, including in court.

In one lawsuit, which he recently discussed on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Kennedy served as co-counsel to Dewayne “Lee” Johnson, a school groundskeeper in California. Johnson had sprayed large amounts of Roundup and Ranger Pro (another glyphosate-containing herbicide introduced by Monsanto in the early 2000s) throughout his career, and had been accidentally showered in the chemical when a container broke above him. He began developing lesions all over his body, leading to a diagnosis of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in October 2014. Johnson filed his lawsuit in January 2016, seeking justice for himself and thousands of other victims. He won his battle against Monsanto in 2018 with a landmark verdict that set important legal and political precedence. 

After a five-week trial, the court ruled in favor of Johnson, awarding him $289.2 million in damages. While Monsanto later succeeded in bringing this amount down to $78.5 million, Johnson v. Monsanto served as a turning point in America’s battle to hold dishonest corporations accountable. Kennedy and his team were honored with the 2019 Trial Team of the Year award for their work on the case.

Roundup was brought to market in 1974 by Monsanto, an agrochemical company with a checkered history in chemical warfare. Founded in 1901, Monsanto’s first ventures centered around food additives like artificial sweeteners and caffeine. It soon added aspirin, sulfuric acid and the cancer-causing polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) to its portfolio. PCB was widely used in the manufacturing of many industrial and consumer products, until it was revealed how toxic it was to human health and the environment.

This track of diversification quickly became a trend for Monsanto, as well as a business opportunity that led to wartime government contracts. The company joined the Manhattan Project in 1943, helping to develop the world’s first nuclear weapons. In 1944, Monsanto started manufacturing DDT as an insecticide, primarily intended to kill mosquitoes infecting soldiers with malaria and typhus during World War II. It was then repurposed for general civilian use in agriculture and household gardening, despite evidence that it could cause cancer and paralysis in humans, and act as an endocrine disruptor.

Another “herbicidal weapon” that came out of World War II was Agent Orange, which the United States Army planned to use against Japanese soldiers – had they not surrendered after the nuclear attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Agent Orange was later deployed as a weapon during the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 70s, with Mosanto serving as a manufacturer for the United States Armed Forces.

The extent of the damage caused by DDT and Agent Orange is difficult to process. DDT was suspended for use in 1972 by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Lawsuits related to Agent Orange were brought by Vietnam veterans in the 1980s. American troops had suffered severe health effects from exposure to dioxin, a primary component of Agent Orange. 

But in 1970, Monsanto identified the next chemical herbicide through which it would bolster its fortune: glyphosate, and launched it in 1974 under the name Roundup. 

As Kennedy described during his interview with Rogan, Roundup was initially used to spray individual plants, as it would kill any plant it came into contact with. Despite this, Monsanto insisted for years the spray was “safer than table salt” and unlikely to harm animals or humans.

In the 1980s, Monsanto experimented with genetic engineering of plants, with its scientists claiming to have conducted the first successful modification of a plant cell’s genome in 1983. These experiments allowed Monsanto to combine genes from a Roundup-resistant bacteria into various crops, leading to the launch of so-called “Roundup Ready” soybeans in 1996. Roundup Ready corn followed just two years later. As Kennedy explains, “you could pour glyphosate all over [that corn], and it would do nothing to it.” After this innovation, farmers began spraying Roundup across entire fields, killing everything except the desired crop, and saturating both the land and the food itself with the highly-toxic pesticide for years to come.

Of course, this meant the people working the land and eating the food were also awash with the chemical. Despite years of prior knowledge of glyphosate’s cancerous potential in humans, it was not until March 2015 that it was officially recognized as such by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). This quickly led to some 300 lawsuits being filed in state and federal courts. 

Monsanto is a particularly ruthless example of the “revolving door” between industry and regulatory agencies in the United States. Many former Monsanto executives have gone on to work in powerful government positions, and vice-versa; a pattern that exists across many industrial sectors, including pharmaceuticals, energy/the environment, telecommunications and food. 

As recently as February of this year, the Environmental Protection Agency allowed transportation company Norfolk Southern to execute an uncontrolled burn of a plethora of toxic chemicals that had spilled following a derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, resulting in the mass exposure of thousands of citizens to chemicals including dioxin – a primary compound of Agent Orange. As has been well-covered by Ryan Cristián of

The Last American Vagabond

, residents of East Palestine continue to suffer from a wide range of physical and cognitive effects to this day, with the Biden administration largely failing to hold Norfolk Southern to account. 

Rather than addressing the ever-increasing burden of chronic disease among Americans, power and profit continue to prevail, leaving the public with insufficient scientific analysis about the health consequences of the products we eat, communicate with, power our homes and cars with, and take as medicine.

As a presidential candidate, Kennedy has made the dangers of corporate capture a central theme in his campaign. And he has vowed to “rein in the lobbyists and slam shut the revolving door that shunts people from government agencies to lucrative positions in the companies they were supposed to regulate, and back again.”