The year is 1901. John Queeny, despite having to quit school and start working at the age of 12, has just founded Monsanto Chemical Works–a company so successful, it’d soon force farmers, people, and even governments into decades of death, public health crises, and relentless legal battles.
Monsanto is most known today for their pesticide products; however, the company actually originally started out producing saccharin (known to many as those familiar pink sugar packets). Saccharin is a zero-calorie sweetener that, at the time of its creation, was almost exclusively produced in Germany. Despite having a history in pharmaceuticals, Queeny thought the untapped food additive market in the United States was an ideal way to raise a fortune. The young company survived all the way up to World War I, where it found new success in material and chemical production. Beforehand, the United States relied on German chemical imports; but when foreign chemical imports collapsed due to the war, Monsanto Chemical Works filled the gap. This shift helped Monsanto turn from a fledgling company to a deadly leading force in the American chemical industry.
On December 1st of last year, Chicago Attorney General Kwame Raoul reported that his office had just settled with American agricultural and biotechnology company Monsanto for 120 million dollars. In 2022, his office filed a lawsuit against Monsanto, claiming Monsanto knew their polychlorinated biphenyls were not only toxic, but were also contaminating the local environment. In 2016, a Washington state school sued Monsanto because students were exposed to PCBs. After this, Monsanto was sued by the city of Seattle, followed by the state of Oregon, Ohio, and Delaware, as well as multiple counties, cities, and schools. Only including public and settled cases, Monsanto has been forced to pay over a billion dollars in settlements because of their PCBs.
But what are PCBs? Why is Monsanto being sued over something that used to be found in pretty much everything? PCB, or polychlorinated biphenyl, is a heat-resistant “forever” compound that was once essential for electrical equipment. In 1935, Monsanto, under Edgar Monsanto Queeny’s leadership, bought the Swann Chemical Company. This gave Monsanto the patent to produce PCBs. According to the Washington Post, almost immediately after opening, Monsanto’s PCB plant in Anniston, Alabama, was plagued with reports of people with pus-filled boils on their skin, liver disease, neurological issues, and more. Just two years after the plant opened, Monsanto hired Cecil Kent Drinker to investigate the impact of PCBs on employee health. Drinker’s analysis showed that PCBs, when in contact with skin or breathed in, even in small amounts, severely damaged the liver and general health. Despite this, Edgar Queeny decided that the profit margins were just too good to stop production. The discovery of PCBs’ toxicity was not treated as a tragedy, but rather as a monetary liability. Instead of doing anything about the actively dying workers in their factories, Monsanto told workers that their failing kidneys and oozing skin were because they didn’t bathe enough. “We can’t afford to lose one dollar of business,” internal documents said.
In addition to founding their own town just to pay less taxes, Monsanto also dumped all toxic sludge from their Anniston plant into local creeks, rivers, and pits. This sludge leaked into local neighborhoods and turned the water into a battery acid mix of red, yellow, blue, and even black. Children and families carried chemicals on their skin, and wildlife in Snow Creek suffered. In 1966, Monsanto hired a Mississippi State University biologist named Denzel Ferguson to find out exactly how deadly the effects had been. When Ferguson submerged 25 fish into local creeks, all 25 lost equilibrium and died within three minutes. He noted that the water “would probably kill fish [even] when diluted 1,000 times or so.” He, like Drinker, urged Monsanto to do something about it. How did Monsanto respond? They didn’t. They didn’t change a single thing about their practices, not until Swedish studies showed the public how deadly PCBs were. When called out, Monsanto “reduced” the amount of contaminants leaking into Snow Creek. However, records within Monsanto show that the Anniston plant was still dumping 50,000 pounds of PCBs into Snow Creek, and over 1 million pounds of PCB waste in landfills every single year. While the Monsanto empire continued to poison Alabama, Edgar Queeny branched out into Texas. This would be one of the worst industrial accidents in history, but to Queeny? Just one big loss of profit.
On the morning of April 16th, 1947, a fire on a French sea vessel created a series of explosions that eventually caused Monsanto’s plant in Texas City to implode. Tanks of styrene in the factory, an extremely flammable liquid, would be ruptured and thus explode into a blazing inferno of chemicals. Around half of the employees ended up killed, and over 200 were injured. By the end of the incident, all of the Monsanto firefighting team were dead. In total, over five thousand were injured by the accident. Although no record survives of Edgar Queeny’s reaction to the Texas City Disaster, accounts of his response to a later Monsanto explosion reveal a pattern. Within a year, the Texas City plant was open again, back to churning out plastics.
Soon, Monsanto would pivot once more to what it’s known for today: agriculture. During World War II, Monsanto started to manufacture insecticides, and then afterwards, herbicides. Decades later, as the United States found itself fighting a losing battle in Vietnam, they found themselves needing something that would get rid of the jungle that gave the Viet Cong their advantage. Because of this, Agent Orange was manufactured to kill all vegetation in sight. Monsanto was the main supplier of Agent Orange to the U.S. during the war. The United States then proceeded to spray around 20,000,000 gallons of Agent Orange over not just rainforest, but also entire communities. 4 million people were exposed, and in the 1970s, mothers’ breast milk and the blood of military personnel were found to have high levels of dioxin in it. In a study by Dr. Nguyen Viet Nhan, children in areas sprayed by Agent Orange were born with things like cleft palates, mental disabilities, hernias, and extra fingers and toes. Dioxin was so toxic that kids continued to be born with defects even generations after initial exposure. After the war, Monsanto would continue to produce herbicides, this time—for everyone.
These pesticides were made up of an acid called 2,4,5-Trichlorophenoxyacetic acid, or 2,4,5-T. 2,4,5-T was made by heating hydroxide ions and a benzene ring with 4 chlorine atoms. The heat forces the hydroxide to replace the chlorine and allows for more chemicals to be attached, thus giving you 2,4,5-T. Now, where do the public safety issues appear, you may ask? The temperature needed to make 2,4,5-T is exactly 338℉. However, even just a slight variation in the temperature gives the system enough energy to fuse molecules and create dioxin. Like before, when Monsanto was notified of this by researchers, the company opted to tell no one. However, when people eventually started to catch on that 2,4,5-T was dangerous, Monsanto needed another herbicide; something safer, something like—glyphosate: a miracle herbicide that blocked a plant’s ability to create amino acids. They named it Roundup. It was amazing, perfect for the average person, and amazing for farmers who needed pesky weeds out of their crops. Roundup worked wonders, killing every plant it touched—the only issue was that it killed every plant it touched. Farmers could only spray it on their fields so much without damaging their crops. However, if Monsanto could find a way to make crops resistant to Roundup, then they’d have a monopoly on their hands.
Chemical plants produce a lot of waste, and while most things can’t survive the toxic byproducts—there’s always an exception. Monsanto researchers went to their glyphosate factories and scooped up anything that was somehow still alive despite all of the glyphosate—most importantly, salmonella strains. Monsanto could now inject the salmonella’s glyphosate resistant genes into their plants. They’d found a way to make one of the best herbicides on the market, and resistant crops to go along with it. If you were a farmer, you could get your hands on these crops just by signing “Monsanto’s Technology Use Agreement.” Sounds great, doesn’t it? All you had to do was agree to not save or clean your crops and seeds, not to supply the seed to anyone, to allow Monsanto to access your land, take samples, examine, and more. Even better, you didn’t even have to put in all the effort and work and sign all that paperwork, you could simply just—open a bag of seeds! Even if you didn’t buy Roundup, what happens if your neighbor’s herbicide got carried by the wind into your field? Your crops could die! Farmers signed Monsanto’s deal in droves. Even if you didn’t, they’d be at your door, and not just as salespeople. Dave Runyon, an Indiana farmer, said in an interview with CBS news, “I wasn’t using their products, but yet they were pounding on my door demanding information, demanding records.” Runyon had never bought Monsanto products, but a few days after this, he got a letter from Monsanto threatening to sue him for patent infringement. Monsanto sent cops, private detectives, planes, helicopters, letters, hotlines, and more, all to find farmers who “misused” Monsanto’s products. By 2013, Monsanto had acquired over 20 million dollars from farmers who they had sued.
On March 20th, 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer reported that glyphosate was carcinogenic to humans. Roundup customers were being diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, respiratory issues, and more. Monsanto, before the 2015 research came out, had sold 1.7 billion pounds of Roundup in 2014 alone. Customers who had used Roundup and developed health issues afterward sued Monsanto.
Monsanto was forced to give up internal papers to lawyers, and suddenly, Monsanto wasn’t just a pesticide company with a shady past. Internal documents, again, showed Monsanto had known glyphosate was carcinogenic and yet did nothing about it. But other national and even international health organizations like the Environmental Protection Agency and the World Health Organization had said that glyphosate was safe in the past; Monsanto had pressured them into approving it. Bill Heydens, the former Regulatory Product Safety Assessment Lead of Monsanto, suggested having Monsanto employees ghost write papers on glyphosate and afterwards having non-Monsanto scientists: “just edit & sign their names so to speak,” so that Monsanto could get their message pushed out—while having credible names on the cover. He also sent an email to his coworkers about “approaching EPA and… asking if there is anything that would help them defend the situation.” Lawsuits piled up, and every new document revealed only served to fuel the fire. Then, in 2018, after Monsanto had just been forced to pay $289 million, and at the peak of its controversy, Bayer bought Monsanto, and all of the debt and lawsuits that came along with it. The name Monsanto was dropped, Roundup and other products were rebranded, and the 117 year old legacy of Monsanto was gone.
Today, people still live with the effects of PCB exposure, entire generations are plagued with mental and physical disabilities caused by Agent Orange, and millions live with cancers and other long-term issues caused by something they were all told was harmless. Monsanto may be no more, but the people they—and everyone who enabled them—impacted will live with the effects of Monsanto’s actions forever. Monsanto is a testament to greed and how corporations truly don’t care about you. Stay aware, alert, ask questions, and fight against the exploitation and overreach of corporations.
