Chemical Shock

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What’s in the food?

Those who eat “organic” food are largely protected from synthetic pesticides. The Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 forbids organic farmers from spraying synthetic chemicals and fertilizers and growing genetically engineered crops. But those eating conventional food sprayed with synthetic chemicals and fertilizers eat, necessarily, food contaminated by those chemicals and fertilizers.   

No restaurant menu or label in a food store says anything about chemical pesticides in food. 

DDT, parathion, chlorpyrifos, neonicotinoids, and glyphosate are a few of a myriad names identifying pesticides.

America hooked on pesticides

The US and other “industrialized” countries have been drenching themselves in pesticides – for decades. 

For example, in 1982, there were 30 companies in charge of the production and sale of pesticides in America. These major producers supplied 3,300 formulators who distributed their products to some 2 million farmers. There were also 100 other producers connected to 29,000 distributors who sold their pesticides to 75,000,000 households and 40,000 pest control companies. 

All this production and trade relied and relies on the “registration” or approval of the sprays by the US Environmental Protection Agency. From 1970 to 1982 EPA registered 1,400 chemicals known as active ingredients. The chemical industry then made these active ingredients into 35,000 products. 

According to EPA data, agrichemical companies produced, in 1982, about 1.5 billion pounds of pesticides. This production employed 15,000 people while earning $ 5.8 billion for the 30 major pesticide corporations. Agriculture used 62 percent of all pesticides; industry and government 24 percent, and 14 percent went to supply homes and gardens.   

In the decades of the 1970s and 1980s EPA approved between 450 and 500 new pesticides, nearly one half of the total sprays licensed in the United States in the last century.

Pollution

Millions of pounds of approved synthetic substances, including pesticides, are being dumped into the environment every day, not just in the US but also around the world. 

These chemicals seep into drinking water, are carried thousands of miles by wind and rain from the site of application, remain potent long after they are deposited, and constitute, in the words of William Carl Heinrich Hueper, “biologic death bombs with a delayed time fuse… which may prove to be, in the long run, as dangerous to the existence of mankind as the arsenal of atom bombs.” Hueper was a scientist who worked for the National Institutes of Health.

EPA: protector or gatekeeper?

President Richard Nixon founded the EPA in December 1970. Its mission has been to protect human health and the natural world from the deadly effects of chemicals and other toxic substances. 

Over the course of its 49-year history the public has usually seen it as exercising its “protective” function. It must be doing something right—after all, proponents of the free market have constantly attacked it for being “alarmist” and over-zealous, and for having a negative effect on the economy. 

But the EPA is also the “gatekeeper.” It approves products. These include thousands of chemicals used for everything from dry cleaning to farming. 

Under the pretense of working with science for the protection of public health, the EPA issues standards of “tolerance” (how much of any chemical can the human body “safely” absorb) and “risk-benefit analysis” (highlighting the benefits of sprays to farmers and minimizing the risks for those eating the sprayed food). 

These EPA standards are like gears for an engine. They keep agribusiness on the move. They give legal protection to the food products of industrialized agriculture and to the stores selling them. 

Agriculture, however, has been trapped in a downward spiral of dependency, in which the fabled, and illusory, yield of crops has been secured at the price of fueling a $ 50 billion global pesticide industry, one which is, on the face of its own record, not concerned with protecting public health or the environment, but with profit—and pushing chemical addiction through the government itself. The EPA, the protector, has become largely complicit with the pusher.

How did this come about?

First, the EPA, almost from its inception, became a captive of the main industry it was chartered to regulate.

I watched this horrific process unfold from the inside. As an EPA analyst working at the agency from 1979 to 2004, I participated in meetings in which I could see the corruption gather momentum. I kept talking to the scientists who were outraged when they did their jobs, and were ignored. I began to collect what became a huge mass of documents showing how and why this seduction and hollowing out of the EPA took place in the 1970s and 1980s and 1990s when the precedent was set and the irreparable damage done. 

I watched as EPA based almost all of its findings about the “safety” of chemicals on reports of “scientific” studies by the manufacturers of those chemicals, almost all of it based on scientific fraud by those companies and the frequently criminal “experts” they employed. EPA also outsourced a staggering amount of its watchdog function—and its moral conscience. 

This all took place under both Democratic and Republican administrations. EPA became a servant of the politicians and the producers. That is its great tragedy—and ours. 

I have waited for many years, hoping against hope that either a democratic administration or the environmental movement would stand up for public health and the environment, insisting that the country should ban pesticides. 

It never happened. 

The least I could do, and I did, was to tell my story at EPA: “Poison Spring,” a 2014 book in which I detailed the role of EPA, the White House, Congress and the industry in the creation, government approval, and use and deleterious effects of pesticides in the United States.

The politics of EPA corruption

With the assistance of the White House and Congress, industry influences and often controls the actions of EPA. As a result, EPA slowly withdrew from enforcing the law; doing nothing to bring bad practices to an end; overlooking evidence of wrongdoing; ignoring the rapid increase of cancer and other diseases corresponding to the rapid spread and increase of the use of toxic chemicals and pollution; and failing to keep companies accountable. 

Chemical companies produce defective and fraudulent “studies” to put their applications for approved use in a favorable light, emphasizing the “benefits” and downplaying the dangers of the chemical or device they want to sell here and in many other countries. 

The EPA political appointees know that scientists want to do credible science, but they also want to be rewarded for what they do. So, the EPA bosses emphasize the economic benefits of the “scientific” work of EPA. 

This means registering pesticides as new “tools” for the farmers. In other words, the managers of EPA stimulate the climate that encourages the scientists to think of their wellbeing first, downgrading or ignoring public health and the natural world. 

Any president and his appointees at EPA could have stopped this process of corruption, but they have so far chosen to follow their political instincts of favoring the mighty chemical and agribusiness industries. 

The difference between Republican and Democratic administrations is one of style, not substance. The Republicans always hammer in the economic benefits argument: What is good for large farmers and agribusiness is good for America. The Republicans also use the budget weapon more forcefully to silence and or eliminate programs that are making a difference in public health and environmental protection. 

The Democrats are more circumspect. They treat the scientists gently, giving them the illusion that simply doing their jobs is the equivalent to protecting public health and the environment. Democratic Party politicians running EPA talk a lot about public health and the environment while doing the bidding of the industry.   

Given these political realities, it is almost impossible for EPA to defend nature and human health. Bad news is ignored––unless, in rare instances, the alarm bells are ringing at a deafening level. (This was the case in the banning of DDT in 1972.) 

EPA pays for data from outside consultants, only to hide, shred, or dump negative findings about risks posed by the use of highly toxic chemicals. Thus it has become, in effect, a polluters’ protection agency.

Politicians have made certain that EPA looks the other way while businesses turn the spigot of pollution on. But since cancer takes decades to show up, the government, the industry and the scientific community and the media don’t bother filling the dots connecting the parallel paths of pollution and cancer. 

Yet the country has been living through public health and ecological meltdowns, which, unlike the current Donald Trump administration meltdown, remain almost invisible.

The toxic politics and corruption surrounding Trump, however, all but push the environmental disaster, including the  extinction of species and global warming, out of the forefront of politics and policy. 

The secrets of pesticides

Pesticides originated from warfare and petroleum. They are petrochemicals. The most deadly toxins used, organophosphates and carbamates, are the descendants of substances—nerve gasses—developed for chemical warfare. 

In order to bind, stabilize, and disperse these “active ingredients,” innocuously named “inerts” make up the rest of a pesticide. Far from being “inert” these are almost invariably as dangerous and poisonous as the toxins they enfold.

Sometimes the inerts act as synergists, increasing the toxic impact of the active ingredient by knocking out the liver’s life-saving powers. 

An EPA scientist described the chaos of inerts as the “inerts-bucket-of-worms.” The deficient and biased methods of approval by EPA, including contaminants like dioxins, fail the tests of science and public health. 

For example, the weed killer 2,4,5-T, which was half of Agent Orange, the weapon America used to destroy forests and rice fields in Vietnam, was contaminated by dioxin, the most toxic of man-made chemicals. 

The US Forest Service sprayed that Dow Chemical herbicide 2,4,5-T in the woods of Oregon, resulting in miscarriages among women living close to the sprayed area. EPA used the evidence from a study of the effects of dioxin in Oregon to ban 2,4,5-T. 

Dow Chemical used its political connection with the White House and EPA to take its revenge. EPA dismantled its Health Effects Branch responsible for funding the study of the Oregon women. Dow Chemical has yet to clean up the dioxin pollution in its factory grounds in Midland, Michigan, a 1,900-acre manufacturing plant. In addition, wastewater from the Dow Chemical works contaminates the Tittabawassee River and Saginaw Bay. This is a huge area with fish and wildlife. Fishermen catch and sell fish contaminated by dioxins. 

The plight of honeybees

Another horror story from the EPA is the poisoning of honeybees laying the sweet egg of honey and performing the vital services of pollinating one-third of our crops: Honeybees became one of the first and chief victims of the cozy relationship of EPA to the owners of pesticides. 

In 1974, EPA approved parathion and other powerful sprays, in nylon microcapsules the size of dust and pollen particles. These bubbles of poison on spring flowers, weeds, and blooming crops have been decimating honeybees. 

Second, the agribusiness-academic complex is spinning other than pesticide theories in explaining the demise of honeybees.

Testing fraud

The chemical industry has behaved in criminal fashion in order to protect highly profitable pesticides; most of them bring in $ 50 to $ 100 million per year for 10 to 20 years. To protect their 17-year patent term products, the companies employed blatantly fraudulent scientific practices in the testing of its products. 

This outrageous practice was spotlighted by the revelation that the Illinois-based Industrial Bio-Test Laboratory had faked data for thousands of animal studies from the 1950s to the 1970s. The fact that IBT had “tested” about 40 percent of all pesticides and drugs in the American market underlined the magnitude of corruption in the chemical industry and, of course, IBT’s criminal deception.

EPA discovered other, lesser IBTs; Stanford Research Institute faked data on insecticides for Shell, the giant British chemical and petroleum company. Even a government laboratory in Texas belonging to the US Department of Agriculture indulged in shameful and illegal practices in order to support an insecticide with the power of DDT and nerve toxins. 

Small is safer

EPA politicians suppressed the work of Sharon Hart, a scientist from Michigan State University, who was funded by EPA. Her report showed that large farmers use significantly more pesticides than small farmers. EPA buried the results of this study because it contradicted the ill-founded contention of the entire agribusiness-academic-government complex that agribusiness was an “efficient” way of raising America’s food. 

The Michigan study showed the dangers of eating onions from large farms, the amount of poisons they use becoming progressively larger as the size of the farm increases. Given the reality that methods used for growing onions are similar to those employed in using chemicals for growing all other crops, the implications are damning for large farms and the food they produce. 

Ronald Reagan

The administration of Ronald Reagan remade EPA to be the servant of polluters. I noticed EPA scientists gave lip service to the integrity of science in public, but betrayed that integrity when they knew they would not be accountable for doing so. In fact, the Reagan administration muzzled and ordered the scientists of EPA to do nothing without official orders.

In the early 1980s, my supervisor told me he cared less for environmental protection. I asked him why he was at EPA. “I am working at EPA to make policy,” he said. 

In that climate of carelessness, hubris and fear EPA political appointees undermined the very foundations of science at EPA. 

For example, the Reagan EPA funded a multi-year multi-million dollar study of the traces of toxins in Hispanics in the US. The study was done at EPA’s laboratory in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, specializing in dioxin analysis. 

The Hispanics research had the effect of disrupting the laboratory’s dioxin work – the main reason for the Hispanics study. Nevertheless, the results of the Hispanics study were so politically explosive – widespread pesticide residues in the Hispanics -- that the Reagan administration suppressed them. 

Poisoning the water

Pesticides, of course, did not merely target Hispanics but the entire population of the country. 

In farm states like Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Nebraska and California, each growing season results in the contamination of the drinking water of millions of people. Weed killers and other sprays move from the fields to rivers and streams and groundwater, all sources of drinking water for humans. 

An EPA colleague, a chemist named Padma Datta, kept talking to me about water pollution. He monitored public water supplies for the agricultural poisons that seeped into drinking water, especially in the rivers of Ohio. 

Studies done at universities show that the insults of pesticides in drinking water are severe: birth defects; premature births peaking during the farmers’ spray season, April to July; a harvest of cancer, especially among farmers and those living close to farmers. The more bushels of corn and soybeans the farmers bring home, the more cancer hits them.   

 A secret 1983 EPA study revealed massive contamination of the country by chemicals, wastes, and pesticides. Of all those threats, pesticides had the most serious effects. 

Legal crimes

The largest chemical companies would convince the governors of several states that none of the chemicals at their disposal were effective in protecting crops from insect and fungal enemies. They did this in order to jointly appeal to EPA to allow them to use untested and, therefore, unregistered pesticides. 

EPA rarely disapproved such blatant violation of the spirit if not the letter  of the law. Tons of extremely toxic chemicals, including DDT, have been poisoning millions of acres of land used for agriculture in America for decades without any concern for those eating food and drinking water. This corrupt practice continuesto this day.

George W. Bush

The administration of George W. Bush was as bad as that of Reagan in both deception and the wrecking of an effective EPA. With his preoccupation with wars for petroleum and “terrorism,” Bush abandoned the environment to the industry, forcing EPA to become subservient to the polluters for its very survival. 

Eric Schaeffer, director of EPA’s office of regulatory enforcement, resigned in 2002 because of White House interference on behalf of the energy power companies dumping millions of tons of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide per year into the atmosphere. Those poisons are killing thousands of Americans every year. Bush also did nothing about global warming. An industry lobbyists working at the White House censored all government research on global warming. Finally, EPA shut its own libraries and labs, a sure sign it was fading out of environmental protection. 

Metamorphosis

From the administration of Richard Nixon to that of Donald Trump, EPA evolved to accommodate the corporations’ ceaseless quest for profits. 

Both Republican and Democratic administrations pushed this business ideology down EPA’s throat. The Trump administration is so bad it  easily wins the competition for being in the pockets of polluters. 

As a result, America is swimming in chemicals and Americans are suffering from the massive impact of chemical shock. 

It is high time for action: removing EPA from working for the political protection of private interest and restoring it to a truly independent agency empowered to function, like the Federal Reserve or the Supreme Court, as a protector of the public interest. Neither the president nor Congress nor the industry should have a say in EPA’s protecting public health and the environment.

EPA should also have a national laboratory for testing chemicals. The industry should be forbidden from testing its own products.

With presidents like Trump, my EPA proposal becomes a dream. 

My hope, however, is that citizens stand up to polluters. A modest beginning is dawning in Toledo, Ohio, where residents approved the Lake Erie Bill of rights.

Our future, including the future of the environment, is in our hands; only we can stave off the soon irreversible poisoning of the spring of life. We are responsible for preserving our republic.