Though few members of the public were still denying a link between smoking and cancer at the time, it was still nonetheless rather startling when the extent of the tobacco industry’s deliberate disinformation campaign on that subject got exposed about a quarter-century ago. The déjà vu runs thick watching Jennifer Baichwal’s new documentary, “Into the Weeds,” which provides another illustration of coldblooded corporate denialism in the face of widespread harm.
Here the culprit is agrochemical giant Monsanto, and their product Roundup, purportedly for some time the world’s most popular herbicide. Borrowing from “Big Tobacco’s” playbook of yore, it appears the company set out to bury ample evidence of its carcinogenicity as long as it could, buying malleable scientists and discrediting more principled ones, refusing to apply warning labels, denying a causal…
