I ASKED two Edinburgh council workers to stop spraying weedkiller on my kerb a few years back, explaining that I’d rather have weeds than see poison spread around my neighbourhood. As someone who has been concerned for decades about the toxic legacy of such pesticide products on human health and the environment, I had been following the case of father-of-three Dewayne Johnson, who sued the agrochemical corporation Monsanto for wrecking his health. He had been required to spray its weedkiller, glyphosate, in his job as a school grounds-keeper. Johnson won. In 2018, a California jury ruled that Monsanto had caused his terminal blood cancer – non-Hodgkin lymphoma – and awarded him $289m.