Controlling Slugs with Coffee Grounds Is Criminal in the EU

The EU believes in magic! Forget about the claims of adhering to science. In the EU, coffee grounds are transmuted from benign to poisonous by saying so.

by Heidi Stevenson

Organic gardeners avoid using toxic pesticides, so often resort to more difficult but entirely safe methods of dealing with pests. A tried-and-true method of dealing with slugs is to surround plants with used coffee grounds. But in the European Union, gardeners who use that method are breaking the law!

The EU has decided that anything used to control pests must be approved—and coffee grounds have not gone through the approval process. That, of course, will likely never happen. To be approved as a pesticide, a product must go through extensive and extremely expensive testing for effectiveness and its harms on the environment, people, and animals. Who has the money to do that, other than corporations?

Is is, therefore, illegal for individuals to use coffee grounds for slug control. Only products that have been approved as pesticides may be used. It matters not how obviously safe it is—especially in comparison with Agribusiness’s toxic soup of pesticides. And, of course, the pseudo science of corporations has figured out how to game the system. As a result, we now live with the utter insanity of deadly toxic pesticides sold everywhere, while gardeners can be prosecuted for avoiding them by using coffee grounds!

Pseudo Logic and Pseudo Science

According to Dr. Andrew Halstead, principal scientist of plant health at the UK’s Royal Horticultural Society (RHS):

Anything that has not been through the system is illegal to use as a pesticide, however safe that chemical is perceived to be. …

… This may all sound rather daft, but the intention of the pesticides legislation is to prevent people from applying untested dangerous chemicals.

However, the chances of being prosecuted for scattering coffee grounds in a garden are, I suspect, remote.

Considering how governments have been taking over control of every facet of life, Halstead may be naive about the potential for prosecution. We are now seeing time-honored natural health products disappearing from store shelves because the EU hasn’t approved them. In the US, health food stores and raw milk farmers are being subjected to full-fledged SWAT operations. They’re guilty of only one thing: daring to continue to provide healthy and safe products that people want.

People do not benefit from such tight-fisted regulation of crop-growing methods that makes everything illegal unless specifically authorized. Coffee grounds are illegal for repelling slugs, but metaldehydes are legal, in spite of severe toxicity that can result in loss of bowel and bladder control, muscle tremors, cyanosis, acidosis, and death.

How can anyone suggest with a straight face that the EU’s restrictive laws on natural products, including the use of organic gardening methods, exist to benefit the people? It’s absolutely ludicrous. Our most basic rights—rights more basic than free speech and freedom of assembly, rights so basic no one could ever have thought to enumerate them—are being stripped away. The right to choose our own food is rapidly disappearing, The right even to grow it is fading. It’s being done to benefit multinational corporations, the fronts for the obscenely wealthy elite, the richest one-tenth of one percent of the people.

Multinational corporations benefit from these medieval-like restrictions on our freedoms. Organic gardening—indeed, any private production of food—represents only one thing to these monstrosities of pseudo-food production: competition. The governmental agencies that supposedly exist for the protection of the people have been taken over. They exist to strip people’s freedom of choice to only those things that have been determined to benefit corporate profits.

Twisted Logic

Lest anyone believe that there’s still a possibility that the EU is actually looking out for our well-being, note Dr. Halstead’s comment:

If you were to use coffee grounds around plants with the intention of providing some organic matter in the form of a mulch, rather than as a slug control or deterrent, then the regulations relating to pesticides would not apply.

That’s right, if you use coffee grounds as mulch around plants, it’s perfectly legal! By some twisted bureaucratic pseudo logic, it’s still okay (For how long?) to spread coffee grounds around your plants if you do it to improve the soil. There is really only one conclusion to be drawn from this: If the government says that a product is toxic when it’s used for one purpose, but consider it perfectly safe when used for another purpose, then the government is serving a master other than the people.

Apparently, the EU has written Laws of Transmutation, whereby substances can be transformed from one thing to another simply by willing it. Thus, coffee grounds are transformed from safe and legal to dangerous and criminal if used for repelling slugs instead of mulching soil.

Yes, the EU believes in magic! Forget about their claims of adhering to science. In the EU, coffee grounds are transmuted from benign to poisonous by the simple act of saying, “But, I’m not using coffee grounds to get rid of slugs. I’m using them to mulch the soil!”

Sources:

• Use coffee to beat slugs? Beware, the EU pesticide police are on your trail
• Gardeners using coffee granules to deter slugs breaking EU law – RHS
• Metaldehyde
• Modification of the existing MRLs for metaldehyde in various crops (European Food Safety Agency)

Tagged agribusiness, coffee grounds pesticides, coffee grounds pests, coffee grounds slugs, eu bans coffee grounds as slug pesticide, eu civil rights suppression, eu pesticides, eu suppression, european union coffee grounds, european union slugs, pesticides eu, pesticides slugs eu, politics, pseudo-science, pseudoscience, slugs pesticides