Yet these definitions of “tolerance” require an astonishing level of trust from the consumer. Who does the testing? Who determines what is safe and what is not? Who establishes the tolerance levels? If you think it is the EPA, you would be wrong. In most cases, the EPA bases its decisions to certify chemical products on the research and testing results provided by the very companies that make them.
By using an inadequate and outdated statistical base for setting tolerance levels, the EPA “often does not know what level of pesticide residue usually results from the use of a product, and bases its approval of pesticides merely on industry-supplied safety data.”22
In other words, the EPA’s tolerance setting program “is abysmal and needs a complete overhaul,” one report concluded. “Even when meat was found to be contaminated with dangerously high levels of toxic pesticides, neither USDA nor FDA could stop these products from reaching the dinner table. This is an appalling state of affairs which cannot be allowed to continue.”23
During the Reagan years, I spent several years with the EPA’s “Benefits and Use” division—another ironic name, given that “benefits” meant the benefits (that is to say, “profits”) that pesticides bring to industrial farms and pesticide companies, not the human or environmental health benefits the EPA is supposed to protect.24
To say the least, the staff of this division rarely thought about the adverse effects of pesticides. Cancer, especially cancer caused by pesticides, was not their concern. They listened to the producers of pesticides and their industry-funded academics who sought to “prove” that synthetic cancer-causing molecules in farm sprays were less dangerous than carcinogens that occur in nature. This led to an Orwellian situation in which the EPA was being asked on one hand to regulate processed foods in which these toxic chemicals showed up, and on the other hand being asked to formally allow “acceptable” levels of carcinogenic residuals in farmers’ sprays. No one wanted to acknowledge, for example, that carcinogens sprayed on farms could actually end up in the carrots they grew. At the EPA, this became known as the “Delaney Paradox”: the agency was stuck, essentially left to obscure the quality and potency of the chemicals that end up in the processed food we eat.
In May 1987, the prestigious National Academy of Sciences set out to make the EPA’s job easier. In “Regulating Pesticides in Food: The Delaney Paradox,” the academy concluded that the EPA ought to abandon the Delaney prohibition of carcinogens in food, and instead should regulate all pesticides under a single risk standard assessed during food production.
Whatever its intentions, the decision to abandon Delaney led to a disastrous outcome. Clearly, the more pesticide data companies collected, the more their products would be shown to be carcinogenic; under the Delaney provision, evidence of carcinogenic toxins turning up in processed food would mean that companies were breaking the law. By dropping the law—the only one prohibiting the presence of carcinogens in certain foods—the EPA was offering companies a way to avoid this oversight. Worse, the EPA was now essentially allowing the agricultural industry to regulate itself. Abandoning the Delaney Clause made it easier for chemical companies to hide data and meant that EPA scientists no longer felt obliged to investigate carcinogens in food.
In 1996, the Clinton administration brought this debate to a close when the president signed the so-called Food Quality Protection Act. The law amended a wide swath of chemical regulations, from pesticide and cosmetic oversight to the law establishing “tolerances” in food. Supporters said the new law established “a single health-based standard for all pesticides in all foods.”
Beleaguered EPA scientists said something else: true, there was no more discrimination against processed foods; now all foods could legally be served with a daily dosage of poison.25
In September 1987, while I was writing a speech for Allen Jennings, my division deputy, a colleague suggested that my hard line on pesticide safety might be the result of a misunderstanding of the EPA’s duty. EPA was not designed to keep chemicals that cause cancer, birth defects, or neurological disorders out of food and drinking water, he said. Rather, EPA existed only to ensure that the “risk” from those poisons was not “unreasonable.”
My colleague asked me to study the speeches and congressional testimony of the two chiefs running EPA’s pesticides empire, Jack Moore and Doug Campt. Reading this material would give me proper “guidance” in my assignment to rewrite the speech for Jennings. The message was clear: the EPA’s main role was not to protect human health, but to determine just how much poison human beings can “tolerate.”
The branch of EPA that oversees these “tolerance” decisions—the nerve center of EPA for all things relating to pesticides—is called the Registration Division. Its job is to decide how much poison can legally be present in the food we eat; it is where substantive decisions about pesticides are made. It is also where all data about pesticides receives an initial hearing before scientists examine the toxins in detail.
Over the years, my colleagues repeatedly told me that the Registration Division was in chaos, a madhouse of incompetence and lost or misdirected papers. Officials would mail documents to the wrong people. They would create lengthy documents known as “registration standards” but would rarely follow up to see whether their recommendations were actually being acted upon. When they received documents from chemical companies, they would dump them, misplace them, or simply do nothing. This black hole of paperwork made it far easier for chemical companies to register their products without even rudimentary oversight.26
In March 1987, the EPA hosted a two-day meeting of a group of special interests known by the fancy name Pesticide Users Advisory Committee. I was asked to help with this organization, which had essentially been formed to assure agribusiness that EPA would not get in the way of the pesticide industry.
The members of this committee could not disguise their contempt for the EPA and its attempts to protect wildlife and human health. So they must have been amused as they listened to an EPA ecologist explain the agency’s (halfhearted) plans to protect endangered species from pesticides. I could see the smiles disappear when an EPA scientist described a well water survey seeking to detect traces of pesticides. These corporate representatives clearly felt the EPA had no business looking for poisons—which they used in huge volumes—in America’s drinking water.
EPA scientists had also been troubled for many years that residues of ethylene bisdithiocarbamate (EBDC) fungicides ended up in food, and that these fungicides (which are still in use) degrade to ETU, or ethylene thiouria, which is known to cause thyroid cancer in experimental animals.
These fungicides had emerged as a major problem. The trouble for the agency, as usual, was that these compounds were extremely profitable: the half-dozen EBDC chemicals constituted half of the most popular fungicide sprays and 90 percent of the 120 million pounds of active ingredients used in American farming. EPA knew in September 1987 that some or most of these toxins presented “adverse affects to man or the environment,” and for a time, EPA considered banning them from farming. Because of the resistance from agribusiness, however, nothing happened. Suddenly, in a dramatic turnabout, EPA were toeing the industry line, warning not about the dangers of fungicides but that banning these poisons would cost fruit and vegetable producers $5.6 billion in the first year alone and that food prices would rise by more than 16 percent.27
In October, a colleague asked me to review an EPA/USDA document dealing with the “benefits” of these fungicides. The 250-page document was full of evidence of scientists mouthing the propaganda of the chemical industry. The document was not an assessment or analysis, but a spirited defense of the fungicides from scientists from all over the government (and the country) who claimed that banning these compounds would have an adverse effect on food supplies. Despite the presence of chemicals that cause thyroid cancer in animals and humans, they reported, the fungicides were actually “safe.”
During the Reagan years, working at the E
PA meant living with a certain level of irony. The same month I was asked to acknowledge the “benefits” of dangerous fungicides, I went to a Capitol Hill reception honoring the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. While there I spoke briefly to Congressman George E. Brown Jr., whom I had known for several years. He understood the difficulties I faced at the EPA and was supportive. The rest of the crowd was made up of environmental activists and congressional staff.
We listened to a moving speech by Carson’s friend and disciple Shirley Briggs. Yet even as I was enjoying some good wine and canapés, I began to fear that Carson’s warning had largely faded into history—and out of the public’s consciousness. It was all too clear to me that—even with the EPA overseeing things—the volume of toxins used in America and their destructive impact had increased enormously since Carson’s death in 1964.
Not long after this, I had breakfast with an EPA scientist colleague who told me that an elaborate and expensive EPA survey of pesticides in ground water was a disaster. This $10 million project’s statistical design was fatally flawed, he said, since a large number of the study’s water samples would come not from contaminated agricultural areas but from relatively clean forests and nonrural regions. This meant the results would be heavily diluted; the survey would inevitably “prove” that the contamination of groundwater with farm sprays was of no concern.
My friend also accused the laboratory, which had been hired by the EPA’s water program, of using analytical methods so outdated that they would not even detect most poisons in the water. Within the Reagan administration, of course, this combination—incompetent lab practices and bad statistical design—meant the study would not be a failure, but a success: it would satisfy the administration’s plan of showing there were no significant amounts of toxic substances in America’s drinking water.28
Chapter 2
Pest Control: A Matter of Merchandising
In July 1980, a young man from Cheektowaga, New York, named Thaddeus Jarzabek complained to the EPA that he had gotten “a good whiff ” of a couple of pesticides, after which his life had never been the same. Jarzabek, just twenty-nine years old, said that he had been waking up “with a lot of tiny particles floating inside my eyeballs, and I developed haloes around lights at night.” With no family history of eye trouble, Jarzabek was convinced the troubles had been caused by the “Insta-Fog” pesticides sprayed at the milk cooperative where he worked in upstate New York. Insta-Fog, it turned out, contained piperonyl butoxide, pyrethrins, and a substance called N-octyl-bicycloheptene dicarboxyme.
“On two shifts a week they sprayed over the production area with pesticides,” he wrote. “I was required to sit in a small adjacent office and I still got a good whiff of this stuff. My eyesight has been permanently damaged. In all common sense and logic there must be some correlation between my exposure to these pesticides and this condition. There had to have been some causation. Things like this do not just happen!”
When Jarzabek tried looking up the medical hazards associated with the chemicals in question, he learned that they were “unknown.”
“I would like to know how this stuff can be used around people if the health effects are unknown?” he wrote. “Aren’t there supposed to be laws that require research to be done and to set exposure limits? I am hoping that you could help me find the answer to these questions.”1
Rather than bringing some comfort to this injured man—rather than digging into those pesticides to find out how they had damaged Thaddeus Jarzabek’s eyes—EPA rushed to the defense of the chemical industry, declaring the poisons innocent of all wrongdoing. “We have found no evidence of the three ingredients in question to cause the condition you described,” the EPA declared on September 26, 1980. Jarzabek’s condition could have been caused by “vitamin deficiency, high blood pressure and lack of sufficient sleep.”
The story repeated itself a couple of years later, when a sixty-three-year-old man from Iowa nearly killed himself—in less than two hours—by using four cans of Ortho Indoor Plant Insect Spray. Here again, piperonyl butoxide, petroleum distillates, pyrethrins, and rotenone were among the ingredients in that product.
Within twenty-four hours of his exposure to this insecticide, both by inhalation and by getting it on both hands, the man experienced severe headache, urinary retention, and severe tremors of all four limbs. He was taken to the hospital, and within the next nine days he had developed peripheral neuropathy and was breathing only with the help of a machine. Doctors diagnosed the man with Guillain-Barre syndrome, a serious illness that can lead to paralysis.
“I realize that this Ortho product is not normally associated with producing toxic neuropathies,” the man’s lawyer wrote the EPA. “In view of this man’s history, however, I am compelled to consider that he is suffering from such an acute toxic condition. Sixty days after the exposure he remains partly paralyzed.”2
I discovered these two cases purely by accident, and I was left to wonder: Are such incidents of human poisoning by pesticides that include piperonyl butoxide common or rare? I wasn’t sure. One thing I did know was that dangerous pesticide ingredients are commonly deemed “safe” by agribusiness, bad science, and bad federal regulation. And some of the most dangerous ingredients are known by the benign (and entirely misleading) term “inert.”
The EPA has long made a false distinction between so-called “active” ingredients and “inert” ingredients, or adjuvants. The first, of course, are responsible for the action of the toxic chemical. The role of the second set is less obvious. Inert ingredients are included in a chemical compound to aid in binding it together, or for making the pesticide more effective once it hits its target. From the adjective “inert,” one would naturally assume that these chemicals would have no dangerous effects. Nothing could be further from the truth.
What the pesticide industry defines as “inert” ingredients are, in most cases, very toxic materials indeed. They can include poisons such as acetone, benzene, chlorobenzene, chloroform, ethylene oxide, formaldehyde, formic acid, methyl alcohol, naphthalene, ethylene thiouria, and petroleum distillates. But because of EPA’s surreal “regulation” of both actives and inerts, a known toxic chemical like DDT can be branded “inert” and used in a pesticide. And because there are so many of these chemicals—about 1,800 inert ingredients, which can constitute up to 99 percent of an individual pesticide—their cumulative volume is a real concern. I will never forget the horror and disgust on the face of John Shaughnessy, a senior EPA scientist, whenever the words “petroleum distillates” came up. “We don’t even bother to think about petroleum distillates,” he would often say. “What’s the use? They are carcinogens—all of them. What a terrible mess. And to think they are used as ‘inerts’ in so many pesticides.”
Another EPA official, William Roessler, knew the absurdity of using the word “inert” to describe what are in fact highly toxic chemicals. Although these ingredients are used to make pesticides disperse or to stick to plants, they still show up as unwanted poisons both in the environment and in human food. “We are gradually beginning to realize that inert ingredients in pesticide formulations are not really inert; they could have an impact on the environment, on human and wildlife health, and may even contain toxic or otherwise undesirable contaminants,” he said.3
Seven years later, in 1981, Kenneth Bailey, an EPA pharmacologist, put together a plan to regulate these misnamed “inert” ingredients. His logic was pure common sense: inert ingredients, being chemicals, are no more or less threatening than “active” ingredients, but in contrast to the active ingredients, which are tested for cancer and other life-threatening effects, inert ingredients are rarely, if ever, tested themselves. “If this regulatory trend continues,” Bailey concluded, “inerts will ultimately present more of a potential health hazard than actives.”
Bailey was no more successful than Roessler in changing the way millions of tons of “inert” pesticide ingredients are
regulated. Some physicians, including epidemiologists like the EPA’s Dr. John Kliewer, considered regulating inerts like the cancer-causing petroleum distillates “as important or perhaps in some cases even more important than the active ingredient.”
A Canadian physician, John Crocker, discovered that these pesticide solvents, emulsifiers, and other such “inerts” turn the otherwise merely bothersome virus influenza B into the lethal Reye’s syndrome, especially in children in the countryside who have the misfortune to be sprayed with a pesticide and to catch influenza. Some of these children die terrible deaths as their brains, viscera, and livers disintegrate.4
The EPA learned about Dr. Crocker’s Reye’s syndrome pesticide research but did very little to encourage, support, repeat, or initiate its own investigations into the etiology and pathology of that dreadful disease. In a March 11, 1980, memo, a senior EPA official described the possibility of any adverse effects on humans from solvents, emulsifiers, and drift control agents as “truly negligible.” In 1982, another EPA scientist gave the inert pesticide ingredients a clean bill of health. I asked him about the work of John Crocker. “Crocker’s studies are worthless,” he said.5
However, another EPA scientist, Jeff Kempter, was more astute when assessing the prevalence of inerts. “My guess is that the [Reagan] administration will not want to start digging into the inerts bucket-of-worms except perhaps for only the worst-worst bad actors” such as proven carcinogens, he wrote in a memo dated July 7, 1981. “We should probably offer a bare-bones minimum scenario, which at least would address the inerts we don’t want to see in any pesticide product. [D]ealing with that many chemicals looks like a big job to me and the only alternative we have is to start chipping away at the [inerts] iceberg, but at the highest point where it counts.”
Poison Spring Page 4