Letter to Governor Youngkin

Finally, Virginia considers a glyphosate ban on the State level. I'm surprised, because Virginia is usually frugal about these things and other State and local governments have been told that bans on various poison sprays were unenforceable until backed by federal law, but, enforceable or not, I think a glyphosate ban needs to be part of our law. USPIRG circulated a form letter--two paragraphs with ample room for comments. PIRG's paragraphs appear below in bold; the rest of the letter is mine. The PIRG petition was apparently sent and pulled down on Sunday; I'm sorry I didn't check that and post the letter on Sunday. The PIRG webform for State-level petitions includes fields for a street address; only people who live and vote in Virginia have any business writing to Governor Youngkin,

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Yes, this is a form circulated on the Internet, but if regulation of toxic chemicals is being restored to the State level, I'd like to correspond further with the office of the Governor. I have a lot to add. 

Glyphosate has been known to be a potential carcinogen for almost a decade. But some formulations of Roundup being used to grow our food and to kill weeds in public spaces still contain this toxic chemical. 

Bayer is taking action to make sure it can't be held responsible for the harmful impacts of Roundup. To protect our communities from dangerous toxic chemicals, I urge you to ban the use of glyphosate-containing products.

Bayer promised to withdraw original Roundup (almost pure glyphosate plus preservatives and scent) from the market in 2020. It brought the product back to the market in 2021 and is currently selling at least two versions of "new" Roundup. The version advertised for suburban lawn care is a weaker concentration of glyphosate. The one sold for agricultural use is a real hell's brew of five "herbicides" plus that old familiar scet, which is also known to be toxic.

Once sensitized to the issue by observing the diversity of glyphosate reactions in an open-air market, I can hardly go anywhere without seeing and hearing evidence of the damage New Roundup for Agricultural Use is doing in my rural community. (Note that the name and address on this webform are for a business not an individual; if you want to know who I am and where I live, in real life, that can be arranged.) Friends and relatives react to it; people in Wal-Mart discuss their reactions to it; TV and Internet advertising reflects the shifting demand for OTC meds for reactions to it. 

Basically what people can expect from exposure to New Roundup feels like any combination of symptoms of measles, mononucleosis, and food poisoning. Some people are disabled by it; some work through it. I have one neighbor who admittedly wants to "run people off" the neighborhood in order to buy land cheap, who deliberately sprays Roundup when it is most likely to harm the rest of us. I'm a celiac with reactions that include internal bleeding. I am being deliberately tortured by this neighbor. I'm younger than he is and can ee his body deteriorating faster than mine. But we currently have a local law that if I say out loud on the street what most people say about this man's behavior on the Internet, I can be charged with disorderly conduct--but when he literally tears strips of bleeding body tissue out of me, the law does nothing.

So I think we need some tight restrictions on outdoor spraying of *any* chemicals. And I think Bayer needs to fund studies of samples taken from patients with all chronic bleeding disorders, and to compensate the patients whose samples show that their bleeding is aggravated by exposure to glyphosate. 

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