I work in agriculture as an agronomist, and did some time putting out small plots sprays. I absolutely fucking hate the drinking roundup meme. Yeah sure, pure

I work in agriculture as an agronomist, and did some time putting out small plots sprays. I absolutely fucking hate the drinking roundup meme. Yeah sure, pure Glyphosate has an acute toxicity similar to that of table salt (in rodents). So if you’re a rodent you can drink a solution of it similar to what you could tolerate with a salt water solution. But this says nothing of long term effects and is not a realistic situation and is fucking stupid. Glyphosate on its own is completely ineffective, it requires adjuvants in order to do its work, for the same reason you use dish soap when washing plates. You will never see pure glyphosate used unless you’re working in research where you’re intending to mix it with something. It’s like all that research that equivocates coffee with caffeine, but even worse. Roundup is always glyphosate plus surfactants, in fact the water/surfactant mix will typically be the majority of the bottle. Not only will these surfactants strip the protective mucus from your gut, it’s help the gylphsate cross barriers it would never be able to on its own, where it causes all sorts of havoc. If someone drinks undiluted roundup, they will die in a painful way, though that requires managing to get it down, which typically only happens in suicide attempts. A fully diluted solution intended for spraying is much, much safer, but still likely to make you very sick on ingestion or significant skin exposure like if you get drenched in it. Any study on the short or long term safety of pure glyphosate is worse than worthless, it’s outright misleading because Glyphosate is not Roundup. Bonus: most adjuvants (which often make up the majority of the chemicals we actually spray out) are exempted from the types of registration and safety trials we typically apply to pesticides. Only a few states are starting to make changes to that (California and Oregon or Washington I think, been a while since I’ve looked at it).