Nanny State of the Week: County can use same lawn treatments it banned residents from using

A county government in Maryland has determined some chemicals used in common lawn-care products are unsafe.

The kicker? Even the Environmental Protection Agency — one of the greatest bureaucratic nanny states in this nation of ours — has deemed the chemicals perfectly safe when used in small doses, such as the amount the average person would use on his lawn.

The second kicker? The county exempted its own golf courses and parks from the new ban, so it can continue to use those same, supposedly dangerous, lawn-care products.

We’ve said it before and we’ll surely say it again: Logic, common sense and empirical data have no place in the nanny state.

This week’s winner is Montgomery County, Maryland, where the County Council voted, 6-3, last week to impose the ban. The new rules make lawn care products such as Scott’s Miracle Grow and Monsanto’s Round-Up illicit substances.

As we noted when we covered this same topic in June, when the ban was first proposed the idea was to save county residents from potential cancer-causing chemicals in the weed-killing sprays and spreads.

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