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TOXIC DECEPTION--PART 2
TOXIC DECEPTION, the must-read book by investigative reporters Dan Fagin and Marianne Lavelle, is subtitled, "How the chemical industry manipulates science, bends the law, and endangers your health." (Available from Carol Publishing Group in Secaucus, N.J.: phone: (201) 866-0490; ISBN No. 1-55972-385-8; and see REHW #553.)
The book delivers on the promise in its subtitle: it tells --and documents --a chilling story of corporate manipulation of science, government (at all levels), the media, and public opinion. It paints a picture of the modern corporation out of control. Here we will focus on only one aspect of corporate power: the way science is used and abused so that corporations can continue to sell dangerous and cancer-causing chemicals to consumers who are kept clueless.
Chapter 3, "Science for Sale," documents the following techniques used routinely by chemical corporations:
** Falsifying data.
** Subtly manipulating research results.
** Creating front groups with names like the American Crop Protection Association (formerly called the National Agricultural Chemicals Association) to conduct PR campaigns to convince the public that dangerous chemicals are safe and that life would be impossible without them.
** Co-opting academic researchers to control the research agenda and get the desired research results.
** Attacking independent scientists.
These techniques have allowed the chemical manufacturers to keep dangerous products on the market, set the fundamental direction of scientific research, and define the terms of the scientific and policy debates.
Here is some of the evidence:
Falsifying data. "The U.S. regulatory system for chemical products is tailor-made for fraud," say Fagin and Lavelle. They tell the story (among others) of Paul Wright, a research chemist for Monsanto. In 1971, he quit Monsanto and went to work as the chief rat toxicologist for Industrial Biotest (IBT), a laboratory which at the time was conducting 35% to 40% of all animal tests in the U.S. Wright then conducted a series of apparently fraudulent studies of the toxicity of Monsanto products. Eighteen months later, Monsanto hired him back with a new title, manager of toxicology. On Monsanto's behalf Wright then approved the very studies he had conducted on Monsanto products. When he was testing Monsanto's herbicide called Machete, Wright added extra lab mice to skew the results --"a bit of trickery that was left out of the final report to EPA [U.S. Environmental Protection Agency]," according to Fagin and Lavelle. In two studies of monosodium cyanurate, an ingredient in a Monsanto swimming-pool chlorinator, Wright replaced raw data with after-the-fact invented records, concealed animal deaths, and filed reports describing procedures and observations that never happened. Wright got caught because an alert FDA scientist smelled something fishy; a federal investigation ensued. According to Fagin and Lavelle, "In all three cases, the [team of federal] investigators wrote in an internal memo, there was evidence that Monsanto executives knew that the studies were faked but sent them to the FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] and the EPA anyway." If true, this would be a serious federal crime. The Monsanto executives were never prosecuted and a company spokesperson claims this is evidence of Monsanto's innocence.
Manipulating scientific research results. Fagin and Lavelle document that this is "part of the everyday strategy of chemical companies enmeshed in regulatory battles." They describe a typical case: formaldehyde. In 1980, the Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology (CIIT) released a study showing that rats that inhaled formaldehyde got cancer. Formaldehyde is a common glue in wood products such as plywood and particle board. Kip Howlett, then director of safety and environmental affairs for Georgia-Pacific (a giant wood products manufacturer) laid out a strategy for countering the bad news:
** Claim that rats aren't the right animal to study because they breathe through their noses, never through their mouths;
** Claim that the exposure levels were unrealistically high (even if they were scientifically too low);
** Pay for new studies that will produce different results;
** Hire academic researchers to give "independent" testimonials to the safety of formaldehyde and to put a positive spin on any studies that shows cancer in rats;
** Attack any scientist who says formaldehyde is dangerous;
** Move aggressively to fund universities and other research institutions to steer research in directions that play down formaldehyde's dangers.
This is a fairly typical corporate strategy for using "science" to achieve corporate goals. Together, these tactics are often called "sound science" by corporate polluters and anything else is often called "junk science." Georgia-Pacific needed to counter the bad news about formaldehyde and Kip Howlett laid out a game plan that would be followed by all formaldehyde manufacturers for years to come. It worked. Howlett then graduated to a much more important position: he now heads the Chlorine Chemistry Council where he oversees teams who manipulate science for the purpose of keeping numerous dangerous chlorine compounds on the market.
The keystone of the formaldehyde strategy was to get new data that cast doubt on the CIIT study. Once there is doubt, the regulatory process slows to a crawl or stops entirely. And scientific doubt is relatively easy to create. In this case, the Formaldehyde Institute hired a small laboratory to conduct a new rat inhalation study. They limited the concentration of formaldehyde to 3 parts per million (ppm) whereas the CIIT study had used 15 ppm. EPA scientists said they believed even 15 ppm was too low, but the Formaldehyde Institute used 3 ppm and got what it wanted. In 1980, long before the 3 ppm study was completed, the Institute issued a press release saying, "A new study indicates there should be no chronic health effect from exposure to the level of formaldehyde normally encountered in the home." When the study was published three years later, it showed that, even at 3 ppm, rats suffered from "severe sinus problems" and had early signs of cancer in their cells. Furthermore, they had decreased body and liver weights --sure signs of ill effects. The Formaldehyde Institute did not issue a press release about these unwanted findings.
The Formaldehyde Institute then entered into a contract with the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to conduct a joint study of 26,000 workers exposed to formaldehyde. The study eventually showed a 30% increase in lung cancer deaths among workers exposed to formaldehyde, but the Institute put its own "spin" on the results and got the NCI to go along: the excess cancers may have been caused by something besides formaldehyde, the NCI concluded. (The study design made it impossible to rule out other causes.) Formaldehyde was thus seemingly exonerated.
What was never revealed (until TOXIC DECEPTION told the story) was that the contract between the Formaldehyde Institute and NCI contained the following clauses:
** The Formaldehyde Institute, not NCI, would select which workers that would be studied;
** NCI researchers were denied access to the raw data: job histories, death certificates, information about plants, processes or exposures --in sum, the basic data needed to conduct and evaluate such a study.
Thus NCI had no way to judge the accuracy or the reliability of the data being handed them by the Institute, and no way to check what assumptions and judgments had been made in gathering the data.
Despite this, NCI helped the Institute explain away the 30% cancer increase that the study revealed. It was a clear demonstration of the raw power of the corporation over a federal agency's science.
Corporations assert their influence over academia as well. In the field of weed science, for example, there are few independent scientists. The federal government has 75 weed scientists on staff and the nation's universities have 180. The chemical corporations have 1400. Furthermore, most of the university scientists are not independent researchers. Rather than seeking less-dangerous alternatives, the vast majority conduct studies that promote the continued use of dangerous chemicals. The chemical companies give at least a billion dollars to universities and foundations for agricultural research. "If you don't have any research [funding] other than what's coming from the ag chem companies," says Alex G. Ogg, Jr., former president of the Weed Science Society, "you're going to be doing research on agricultural chemicals. That's the hard, cold, fact."
If academic researchers become too independent, they are attacked. Peter Breysse, a professor of environmental health at the University of Washington gathered evidence that people were being harmed by exposure to formalde-hyde in mobile homes and elsewhere. The Formaldehyde Institute hired a consultant to visit Breysse's superiors at the University to criticize and discredit his work.
Criticizing scientific studies is a standard, even a knee-jerk, corporate tactic. Often any criticism --no matter how far-fetched --serves industry's purpose of deflecting attention away from the real problem.
Fagin and Lavelle describe a study that carefully evaluated exposure to formaldehyde through inhalation, taking into account smoking and exposure through drinking water. Nevertheless, in scientific conferences, corporate scientists attacked the study for failing to take into account smoking and exposure through drinking water.
It is easy to criticize a scientific study, whether the criticisms have any basis or not. The effect on government regulators is predictable: no one wants to base a regulation (which will almost certainly be challenged in court) upon scientific studies that have been criticized. So criticism --whether valid or not --helps derail the regulatory process.
Most importantly, these corporate tactics for manipulating the regulatory process have succeeded in tying up the chemical industry's only nationally-visible adversaries --the mainstream environmental movement. The movement is caught up in endless unsuccessful attempts to regulate corporate behavior around the edges, never tackling the central issue, which is the illegitimacy of corporate power.
Grass-roots environmentalists, on the other hand, are usually engaged at the local level in a power struggle with one corporation or another, directly challenging the corporation's right to poison the local environment. THIS IS THE KEY ISSUE, but eventually it will need to be moved from the local level to larger arenas. When we do that, we will find the larger arenas already occupied by the mainstream environmental movement which seems never to ask fundamental questions. They never ask, "By what authority do corporations spread their poisons into the environment?" and, "What will it take for the American people to reassert the right they used to take for granted, the right to DEFINE corporations, not merely try to regulate them?" After more than 100 years of regulation, we now know without doubt that it does not work and cannot work. Yet the mainstream environmental movement seems unable to think of other, more fundamental, approaches.
No wonder the environment is continuing to deteriorate.
--Peter Montague
LET'S STOP WASTING OUR TIME
The mainstream environmental movement spends its time urging government to regulate corporations that are making people sick while poisoning the planet's air, water, and soil. Regulation is what mainstream environmentalists aim to do. They gather data, write reports to show how bad things have gotten, and then they ask government regulators to modify the behavior of the responsible corporations. In Washington, D.C., and in all 50 state capitals, hundreds or thousands of environmentalists toil tirelessly year after year after year, proposing new laws, urging new regulations, and opposing the latest efforts by officials (corporate and governmental) to weaken existing laws and regulations. They write letters, meet with agency personnel, publish pamphlets and hold conferences, prepare testimony for subcommittees, serve for years on citizen advisory boards, create "media events," mail out newsletters and magazines, organize phone trees to create awareness and raise funds. They pore over immense volumes of technical information, becoming experts in arcane sub-specialties of science and law. They work hard, much harder than most other people. When they find that their efforts have been ineffective, they redouble their efforts, evidently hoping that more of the same will work better next time. Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, Audubon, National Wildlife Federation, The Wilderness Society, The Environmental Working Group, and many others that make up the mainstream environmental community are well-intentioned, earnest, and diligent. They are also, it must be admitted, largely ineffective.
An eye-opening new book describes the nearly-complete failure of all our attempts to regulate the behavior of the chemical corporations. TOXIC DECEPTION, by Dan Fagin and Marianne Lavelle,[1] is subtitled "How the Chemical Industry Manipulates Science, Bends the Law, and Endangers Your Health." In his day job, Dan Fagin writes for NEWSDAY (the Long Island newspaper) and Marianne Lavelle writes for the NATIONAL LAW JOURNAL. Both are award-winning investigative reporters, and this book shows why: it is thorough and thoroughly-documented, even-handed, careful in its conclusions, and absolutely astonishing in how grim a picture it paints of our corporatized democracy. Even those of us who study chemicals-and-health full-time have never put all the pieces together the way these two have.
The book is organized as a case study of only four dangerous chemicals: atrazine, alachlor, perchloroethylene and formaldehyde.
** Atrazine is a weed killer used on 96% of the U.S. corn crop each year. Introduced in 1958, some 68 to 73 million pounds were used in 1995, making it the best-selling pesticide in the nation. Atrazine interferes with the hormone systems of mammals. In female rats, it causes tumors of the mammary glands, uterus, and ovaries. Two studies have suggested that it causes ovarian cancer in humans. EPA categorizes it as a "possible human carcinogen." Atrazine is found in much of the drinking water in the midwest, and it is measurable in corn, milk, beef and other foods.
** In 1989, Monsanto introduced Alachlor, a weed killer that complements atrazine. Atrazine is best against weeds and alachlor is best against grasses. Often both are applied at the same time. Alachlor causes lung tumors in mice; brain tumors in rats; stomach tumors in rats; and tumors of the thyroid gland in rats. It also causes liver degeneration, kidney disease, eye lesions, and cataracts in rats fed high doses. Canada banned alachlor in 1985. EPA's Science Advisory Board labeled alachlor a "probably human carcinogen" in 1986. In 1987, EPA restricted the use of alachlor by requiring that farmers who apply it must first take a short course of instruction. Much of the well water in the midwest now contains alachlor and its use continues unabated.
** Perchloroethylene ("perc") is the common chlorinated solvent used in "dry cleaning" (which is only "dry" in the sense that it doesn't use water). In the early 1970s, scientists learned that perc causes liver cancer in mice. Workers in dry cleaning shops get cancer of the esophagus seven times as often as the average American, and they get bladder cancer twice as often. A few communities on Cape Cod in Massachusetts have perc in their drinking water; a study in 1994 revealed that those communities also have leukemia rates five to eight times the national average. Perc is ranked as a "probable human carcinogen" and we all take it into our homes whenever we pick up the dry cleaning.
** Formaldehyde is a naturally-occurring substance present in the human body in very small quantities. Mixed with urea, formaldehyde makes a glue that handily holds plywood and particle board together. Mixed with a soap, urea-formaldehyde makes a stiff foam that has excellent insulating properties. After the oil shortage of 1973, Americans began to conserve fuel oil by tightening and insulating their homes, and it was then that people discovered that formaldehyde can be toxic. In tens of thousands of individuals, urea-formaldehyde has caused flu-like symptoms, rashes, and neurological illnesses. In some people, it triggers multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS), a life-long, debilitating sensitivity to many other chemicals, including fragrances and perfumes. In recent years, scientists have confirmed that formaldehyde causes rare nasal tumors in mice and in industrial workers exposed to high levels of formaldehyde gas. It is also linked to brain tumors in people exposed to it on the job (embalmers and anatomists). It is ranked as a "probable human carcinogen" in humans, and we are all widely exposed to it through cabinets, furniture, walls and flooring.
TOXIC DECEPTION documents how the manufacturers of these chemicals --and thousands of others like them --have managed to keep their dangerous, cancer-causing products on the market despite hugely expensive government regulatory efforts, civil litigation by citizens who feel victimized, investigative news reports, congressional oversight of the regulators, right-to-know laws, and hundreds of scientific studies confirming harm to humans and the environment. The book documents how corporations buy the complicity of politicians; offer jobs, junkets and sometimes threats to regulators; pursue scorched-earth courtroom strategies; shape, manipulate, and sometimes falsify science; and spend millions of dollars on misleading advertising and public relations to deflect public concerns. In sum, the book shows how corporations have turned the regulatory system --and those who devote their lives to working within that system --into their best allies.
After reading this book, one realizes that the purpose of the regulatory system is not to protect human health and the environment. The purpose of the regulatory system is to protect the property rights of the corporations, using every branch of government to thwart any serious attempts by citizens to assert that human rights should take precedence. "At the most fundamental level," write Fagin and Lavelle, "the federal regulatory system is driven by the economic imperatives of the chemical manufacturers--to expand markets and profits--and not by its mandate to protect public health."(pg. 13) Why are so many of us still defining our environmental work entirely within the confines of this hopeless system?
After 27 years of unremitting, well-meaning attempts to regulate corporate polluters, here is our situation:
** The government does not screen chemicals for safety before they go on the market.
** Chemicals are presumed innocent until members of the public can prove them guilty of causing harm. Naturally this guarantees that people will be hurt before control can even be considered. After harm has been widely documented, then government begins to gather data on a chemical, but "the agency usually relies on research conducted by or for manufacturers when it is time to make a decision about regulating a toxic chemical."(pg. 14)
** Industry manipulates scientific studies to reach the desired conclusions. According to Fagin and Lavelle, when chemical corporations paid for 43 scientific studies of any of the four chemicals (atrazine, alachlor, perc or formaldehyde), 32 studies (74%) returned results favorable to the chemicals involved, 5 were ambivalent, and 6 (14%) were unfavorable.(pg. 51) When independent nonindustry organizations --government agencies, universities or medical/charitable organizations (such as the March of Dimes) --paid for 118 studies of the same four chemicals, only 27 of the studies (23%) gave results favorable to the chemicals involved, 20 were ambivalent, and 71 (60%) were unfavorable.(pg. 51)
** As of 1994, after 24 years of trying, EPA had issued regulations for only 9 chemicals.(pg. 12) EPA has officially registered only 150 pesticides, though there are thousands of others in daily use awaiting review by the agency.(pg. 11) The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has done only slightly better, setting limits on 24 chemicals after 18 years of effort.(pg. 81)
** Close to 2000 new chemicals are introduced into commercial channels each year in the U.S., virtually none of then screened for safety by government prior to introduction. When screening does occur, it occurs AFTER trouble has become apparent. All together, about 70,000 different chemicals are now in commercial use, with nearly 6 trillion pounds produced annually in the U.S. for plastics, solvents, glues, dyes, fuels, and other uses. All six trillion pounds eventually enter the environment.
More than 80% of these chemicals have never been screened to learn whether they cause cancer, much less screened to discover if they harm the nervous system, the immune system, the endocrine system, or the reproductive system. In sum, in the vast majority of cases, nothing is known about the health or environmental consequences of dumping these chemicals into the environment. It's a huge corporate experiment on the public.
The corporations use a single line of defense: we don't know FOR SURE how dangerous these chemicals really are. But this simple strategy works perfectly because Congress has placed the burden of proof on the public, not on the corporations. We have to prove that we have been harmed. Because we are all exposed to hundreds if not thousands of chemicals each day, pinpointing the source of a rash, a headache, or a brain tumor is next to impossible. Meanwhile the exposures continue. The dice in this game are loaded. Why do we continue to play?
Instead, why doesn't the environmental movement come together to discuss a new strategy --one that asserts the right of a sovereign people to control subordinate entities like corporations? We could lawfully shift the burden of proof onto the purveyors of poisons. We could legitimately deny them the protections of the Bill of Rights. (Rule of thumb: if it doesn't breathe, it isn't protected as a person under the Constitution). We could legally define what corporations can and cannot do, JUST AS OUR GREAT GRANDPARENTS DID IN THE EARLY DAYS OF THE REPUBLIC. (See REHW #488 and #489.) Such a program would no doubt have enormous popular appeal because so many people have been treated with injustice and disrespect by one corporation or another in recent years. Why keep wasting our time? Let's get together and focus our energy on DEFINING (not regulating) corporations. It's the only way we'll ever achieve environmental protection. And it would give people some control over their lives once again.
--Peter Montague
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