Most countries adhere to the "precautionary principle" which requires that if a company produces a novel chemical compound like glyphosate, and would like to use it commercially, it would have to prove its safety to humans before it is released into the environment.

In tune with this concept, an amendment to the Food, Drugs, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 entitled The Delaney Clause was enacted in 1958. James Delaney was a congressman from New York. The clause stated: "The Secretary of the Food and Drug Administration shall not approve for use in food any chemical additive found to induce cancer in man, or, after tests, found to induce cancer in animals."

When originally passed, few officials thought it to have broad application, as the chemical saturation of the environment had not yet begun, and there were only a few chemicals shown to be animal carcinogens.

The first modern food scares based on a chemical additive occurred in 1959 when Arthur Flemming, the Secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, invoked the Delaney Clause and issued a statement about the possible contamination of some cranberries from Oregon and Washington with the herbicide aminotriazole, which the FDA had recently determined was a carcinogen.

As chemicals became more widely used and analytical chemistry became more precise, it became more difficult to administer the Delaney Clause, and this pitted the food safety regulations against the financial pressure from the pharmaceutical and agricultural chemical industries to allow the greater use of and greater concentration of their products.

Diethylstilbestrol was widely used at this time to promote the growth of meat production animals, and it was found that residues remained in the meat. The FDA addressed this issue by using "quantitative risk assessment," declaring that if a carcinogenic food additive was present at a concentration of less than 1 part in 1,000,000, the risk was negligible. Known as the "de minimis" exception to the Delaney Rule, this standard was used throughout the FDA and other agencies.

An amendment to Title IV of the Food Quality Protection Act of 1996 removed pesticide residue tolerances from Delaney Clause constraints. This effectively ended any consideration of the precautionary principle in drug or chemical approval by government regulators.

The "precautionary principle" is used in most other countries and is the basis for their refusal to buy into Monsanto’s and BigPharma’s lies and fraudulent research. If the precautionary principle had been applied in this country, it is doubtful that glyphosate would ever have been approved and we would not be eating, drinking and breathing glyphosate today.

Research not funded by Monsanto clearly shows glyphosate is harmful, but because we use an industry protective "weight of evidence standard" in this country, the burden of proof that it is harmful to humans is on those being exposed to it. For example, consider the number of pharmaceuticals that are rushed through the FDA and put on the market, and then in a few years as the fatalities reach unacceptable numbers, the drug is pulled from the market. Who were the guinea pigs or lab rats in that scenario? Obviously it is the people who suffer the effects of cumulative "acceptable" exposures – the thousands of sudden deaths, birth defects, developmental problems and other "mysterious" diseases that plague our society today.