‘Tis the season when Roundup bottles fly off store shelves like plush Christmas toys in December.

And why not? The world’s top-selling herbicide offers gardeners a take-no-prisoners weed killer that comes with easy-grip handles and spray triggers with excellent action.

Plus, you can shoot scores of weeds dead without having to reload, such is the high capacity of even the smallest of Roundup’s many bottle sizes.

But Roundup could possibly shoot you dead, too, some scientists and many juries have concluded. It’s a possibility Roundup’s maker, Bayer, is desperate for people to disregard.

Disregard the risk Roundup poses to you at your own peril. That’s because in just the last six years Bayer has sold the herbicide, the company has agreed to pay $10 billion to settle thousands of claims that it caused cancer in people. Bayer has also set aside $6 billion to cover pending lawsuits.

Just how big are these dollar amounts in the corporate world? Bayer’s chief officer said last month that Roundup litigation is “an existential topic” for the German company. In other words, the 161-year-old business that brought us Alka-Seltzer and Aspirin may be circling the drain.     

Bayer bought Monsanto, the original maker of Roundup, in June 2018 for $63 billion. Since then, Bayer’s stock price has plunged 75%. The Bayer-Monsanto merger is widely regarded as one of the worst mergers of all time.

At the heart of Bayer’s legal troubles is glyphosate, Roundup’s primary active ingredient. In tan email to The Leader, Bayer spokesperson Alexander Hennig wrote that “glyphosate is one of the best-researched crop protection products in the world.”

While that may be true, not all of the research has been favorable to Bayer. Heading the unfavorable research is a 2015 study by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) that found that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic to humans.”

IARC is a branch of the United Nations’ World Health Organization. It’s not a group that can be easily dismissed.

In his email to The Leader, Hennig wrote that greater focus should be paid to a 2020 interim decision by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which considered 15 animal carcinogenic studies when assessing glyphosate compared to the IARC’s eight.

The EPA said that there are no risks of concern to human health when glyphosate is used in accordance with its current label, and “the EPA also found that glyphosate is unlikely to be a human carcinogen.”

However, the EPA also said that glyphosate was “likely to adversely affect” the following taxa: mammals (75 species), birds (88 species), amphibians (36 species), reptiles (33 species), fish (179 species), and plants (940 species).

Despite the EPA’s 2020 report stating that glyphosate is unlikely to be a human carcinogen, one year later Bayer announced that by 2023 it would remove glyphosate from all of the lawn and garden products it sold in America.

It’s now mid-2024 and the first store I entered looking for Roundup containing glyphosate — the Lowe’s in Silverdale — had many bottles of it on its shelves. And Amazon is still selling glyphosate; it’s the first active ingredient listed in Roundup Concentrate Poison Ivy Killer.

The EPA claims that it evaluates pesticides on a regular basis to ensure that when they are used according to label directions, they will not harm humans or the environment.

You’d think that with each evaluation of the same organophosphorus compound that the EPA would reach the same conclusion. Nope. The agency’s view of glyphosate has grown increasingly favorable over the years even though the compound hasn’t changed.

In 1986, the EPA classified Roundup’s key ingredient as a “possible human carcinogen.” In 1991, the EPA reclassified glyphosate as showing “evidence of non-carcinogenicity for humans.” And, as previously mentioned, in 2020 the EPA decided that glyphosate was unlikely to be carcinogenic to humans.

Two words help explain the EPA’s softening stance toward glyphosate: revolving door. The term denotes a situation wherein personnel move between roles as regulators in the public sector and as employees of industries affected by regulations.

People who once worked for Monsanto and at other times for the U.S. government include former EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus, former Assistant EPA Administrator Linda Fisher, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, former Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and former CIA Deputy Director Earle Harbison.

As a matter of interest, two years after the EPA’s 2020 decision that glyphosate was unlikely to cause cancer in humans, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals partially struck down the decision. The federal appeals court ordered the EPA to take a fresh look at whether glyphosate poses unreasonable risks to humans and the environment.

In a 3-0 decision, the court agreed with several environmental, farmworker and food-safety advocacy groups that the EPA did not adequately consider whether glyphosate causes cancer and threatens endangered species.

The groups faulted the agency for rubber-stamping glyphosate despite its alleged harms to agriculture, farmers, and wildlife such as the Monarch butterfly. 

The court ruled that the EPA did not properly justify its findings that glyphosate did not threaten human health, but it stopped short of preventing people from using Roundup. As of now the EPA is still deciding how best to respond to the court’s ruling.

But wait, there’s more. Researchers at Royal Holloway University of London recently tested four common herbicides: Roundup Ready‐To‐Use, Roundup No Glyphosate, Roundup ProActive, and a competitor’s product, Weedol, which also uses glyphosate.

They sprayed the products directly onto more than 50 bees of a bumblebee species common in Europe and discovered that Weedol didn’t produce significant mortality. However, the Roundup product made without glyphosate killed 96% of the bees.

That matters because bumblebees are a major pollinator, and their numbers are in rapid decline. In our lifetime the American bumblebee was once one of the most common bees in our country. Over the past 20 years their population has declined by 90%. 

Remarkably, the EPA does not test the “inactive ingredients” in Roundup. The study strongly suggests that it should. 

Enough about Roundup. It’s June and the weeds aren’t stopping. They’re popping up in our yards faster than we can say “Whac-A-Mole.”

In response, you can reach for a bottle of herbicide that might harm you, or you can opt for a conventional de-weeder (think trowel or shovel), or you can do what I do and unsheathe a Fiskars 4-claw stand up weeder with easy-eject mechanism.

Or...you can just let the weeds be. As someone once said, “Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them.”

Scott Doggett is a former staff writer for the Outdoors section of the Los Angeles Times. He and his wife, Susan, live in Port Townsend.