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Comment by everdayimhustln | Hacker News Reader

It's no surprise when corrupt regulators cozy with industry are ineffective. It's not that regulation is bad, it's the nuance of having sensible and effective authority, legislation and enforcement that is desperately needed to properly regulate chemicals as and how they are used in many industries.

This is almost as bad as Monsanto guy offered to drink glyphosate and then refused to drink it. https://youtu.be/ovKw6YjqSfM

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And safe is a relative term. something might be safe ingested in trace amounts, or with contact to the skin. But drinking a whole glass of it? that is a different story.

Then don't say a whole glass of it would be perfectly safe.

NO, wrong again. They boldly claimed with a direct, verbatim quote "You can drink a whole quart of it and it won't hurt you." and then refused to drink it when offered.

I don't think GP is distrusting m disagreeing with you; it sounds to me like they're saying "if your point is that it's safe in trace amounts but not for drinking a whole glass, you shouldn't be offering to drink a whole glass"

The poison is in the dose; the LD50 for glyphosate is in the neighborhood of 5 g / kg, which amounts to around a quarter liter of pure glyphosate for a 50kg subject. You want to stay orders of magnitude below the LD50, for obvious reasons.

"How much can you safely drink?" depends heavily on the concentration. A cup of pure, or even the most concentrated form the sell in stores, might do it. Or might not. Once you dilute it for application - usually gallons of water to the tablespoon of concentrate - a cup becomes significantly less threatening.

The problem with that approach is that it is just about acute lethality and does not consider long-term effects from prolonged exposure that are hard to measure.

Further it ignores interactions with other chemicals that are also in use, something that we know is pretty common from medications.

Especially with endocrine disruptors there is also the effect that several chemicals might work in the same direction, where a safe dose of one chemical might be harmless but safe doses of 10 chemicals combined might not be safe anymore.

Well, no, but when the question is "will you drink a cup of this?" a good question is "will this kill me outright?"

Watch the video! He claims "You can drink a whole quart of it [RoundUp] and it won't hurt you."

(It's ambiguous whether reporter means "glyphosate" to mean "RoundUp" product as to avoid advertising a brand name or the compound by itself.)

Roundup contains mroe than glyphosate.

You probably shouldn't drink a quart[1] of glyphosate, but you definitely should not drink a quart of roundup.

[1] what the fuck is a quart?

Liquid soap is not good for drinking, but no one is in a rush to claim it's toxic and unsafe to use.

WD40? Drano? Household bleach? By your logic one should either drink them and thrown them out with prejudice.

There is also the part where the person blustering about it being safe to drink is being an asshole.

No one is rinsing their lettuce in wd40 and draino.

Not lettuce, but lutefisk is a traditional Norwegian dish made of whitefish and lye, the active ingredient in Drano. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lutefisk

> To make the fish edible, a final treatment of yet another four to six days of soaking in cold water (also changed daily) is needed.

And also, just because it's traditional, doesn't mean it's good for you :)

Last time I checked, none of those three things are used on food.

Pre-packed salads are washed in dilute chlorine.

Household bleach is mostly sodium hypochlorite.

No, the guy who offered to drink glyphosate refused to drink what was given him in totally uncontrolled circumstances.

What's your point?

I think the point maybe spokeperson was lying with "it's so safe" talking points that were demonstrably false.

You think he would drink it in controlled circumstances either? Because i have a bridge to sell you.

He wasn't offered, he claimed it was safe. If it had stopped there, it would just have been a huge turd of a hypocritical lie, as it turned out it's a lesson for those with eyes to see. It's not like he made an appointment to drink one in controlled circumstances either, so you got nothing with your attempt of an excuse for someone who also has nothing. And if that's too personal, then you're blaming me for your not imagining, say, someone seeing the hypothetical shorter version of the interview and, you know, having a pint of it for laughs. This shit to me is the little brother of murder and it's disgraceful to wriggle around it. He should be forced to drink it. That's what he bet on after all, to just say it and not have to do it. Multiply that by billions of people, theoretical victims in the future where this lie is never corrected, and you got yourself a lenient punishment. If you can't tell, this guy and similar peddlers make the hair on my neck stand up.

Glyphosate is only one ingredient of roundup. There are surfactants used in the formulation which are indeed lethal in large doses. Would you trust that the thing you are drinking is only glyphosate, the chemical in question, from some gotcha journalist? I hope not.

Yes and spokeperson implied RoundUp was safe and nontoxic to drink straight, which is obviously and demonstrably inadvisable. What level of low-level, continuous exposure is deemed safe (perhaps from long-term studies not funded by industry) is the billion dollar question.

PS to anyone in the know: How does RoundUp use compare to the US in Scandinavian countries where there are much stricter chemical residue and registers chemical controls?

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