The United States sprayed millions of gallons of herbicides over the forests and rice fields of Vietnam. The result: a huge swath of forest and countryside, 4.5 million acres, became a wasteland of barren and deadly soil and poisonous water. No one knows exactly how much Agent Orange the U.S. Air Force dumped over Vietnam and Laos between 1962 and 1971, but in 1987 the Air Force estimated it had sprayed 17.4 million gallons. Close to 5 million Vietnamese were exposed to this horror; four hundred thousand died or were maimed, and half a million children were born with birth defects. Death would remain lurking in the land for decades to come.3
There was no secret about the horrendous effects of this chemical on man and nature. Only months after this weaponized toxin was introduced, both Vietnamese and American soldiers showed signs of dioxin’s insults to the body: fluid-filled cysts on the skin, and particularly on the face. But time would bring far worse problems: soldiers and airmen who had sprayed Agent Orange from aircraft or been exposed to it on the ground began to exhibit symptoms of everything from persistent numbness, dizziness, and memory loss to depression, violent rages, and suicidal tendencies. Many of these soldiers ultimately died of cancer. After the war, thousands of veterans would testify that they suffered neurological problems, impotence, miscarriages, and deformed babies.4
Yet it would take years for the U.S. government to acknowledge that our veterans had experienced debilitating symptoms of dioxin poisoning. Congressman Bob Eckhardt, Democrat of Texas, accused the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (now the Department of Health and Human Services) of dragging its feet in researching and studying the problems of veterans. And Senator Charles Percy, Republican of Illinois, scolded the Department of Veterans Affairs for failing to take up the veterans’ Agent Orange complaints.5
After years of denial, the government was finally forced to respond to mounting clinical evidence of the impact of this chemical time bomb, even in those who had been exposed to only trace amounts of the compound. There were no Purple Hearts awarded to those gravely injured by dioxin, but their wounds were real––and they never healed. The suffering inflicted on the people of Vietnam, North and South, combatant and noncombatant alike, was, for many years, an unacknowledged legacy of shame inherited by our country.
What the women in Alsea, Oregon, were learning, to their horror, was that the same chemicals that were causing such trouble among Vietnam vets were now entering their own bodies as well.
In March 1979, after the Alsea study revealed a link between the herbicides and miscarriages, the EPA published “an emergency suspension” restricting most of the uses of 2,4,5-T (a major constituent of Agent Orange) and Silvex, an herbicide similar to 2,4,5-T. Two months later, despite industry pressure to do nothing, the agency canceled most uses of both 2,4,5-T and Silvex.6
This should have been a fairly straightforward decision. After all, the EPA was simply moving to ban a chemical that had been shown to have terrible effects on soldiers abroad and pregnant women at home. Yet the effort to ban 2,4,5-T had dramatic consequences for EPA employees trying to do their job. Sales of 2,4,5-T and other dioxin-laced pesticides were in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and the EPA’s discovery of the dangers of these compounds threatened some very big businesses. The chemical companies that made these pesticides wanted payback.
Dow Chemical tried to “silence us,” Hale Vandermer, an EPA investigator, explained to me. “It immediately launched a campaign of disinformation to discredit our epidemiological study, ridiculing us in the scientific community.”
Inside the EPA, the scientists responsible for the Oregon study were “dead,” Vandermer said. Senior EPA officials began “demolition right in our branch.” Scientists involved in the Alsea investigation saw their careers, or at least their effectiveness, come to a premature end. They were relegated to administrative positions in which, the EPA reckoned, they would never again do work that might harm the interests of the chemical industry.7
The Oregon study taught EPA staffers like Vandermer a bitter lesson about the ruthlessness of industry executives and their apologists and enablers inside the EPA. The dioxin study “destroyed our epidemiological program,” Vandermer said.
The agency’s epidemiology team was a network of physicians and toxicologists in some of the country’s leading medical schools doing original research on pesticides and public health. In the early 1970s we had been spending some $15 million per year, and at this time, in 1983, “we barely had the program doing anything, with a little more than $1 million a year,” Vandermer said.
According to Vandermer, “The beauty of that network was that for a modest sum we had the field capability for both monitoring and investigation of a problem. Immediately after an accident, for instance, our medical advisers would be on the scene asking questions, collecting data, offering aid. But more than that, our epidemiological program built a tradition of training, research and education in agricultural medicine and public health. Our investigators published hundreds of articles in a number of scientific journals. They solved many problems, and, fundamentally, they forced the medical and scientific establishments to wake up to the real public health dangers of pesticides.”
Hale Vandermer was right. The discovery that one of mankind’s most toxic substances had been used in the very backyards of pregnant women did not become a shining example of the kind of public health protection the EPA had been founded to provide. It became, for the agency, a kiss of death.
And that was just the beginning.
On March 22, 1980, a woman named Lorraine Carter from the town of Mineral, Washington, sent a handwritten letter to Edwin Johnson, essentially repeating the plea of the Alsea women of Oregon.
“The communities of Elbe, Mineral, and Ashford, Washington are experiencing some unexplained health problems, and we would like the E.P.A. to undertake an epidemiological study of the area,” Carter wrote. “We first became concerned because of an unusually high miscarriage rate in the town of Ashford (population 450). Ten women became pregnant from late July to early October. Eight of these women miscarried from late October to March.”
A month later, April 22, 1980, Carter and ten other women from Mineral, Elbe, and Ashford sent a more detailed letter to Doug Costle, the EPA administrator. They said that from January 1979 to March 11, 1980, thirteen pregnancies ended with ten miscarriages, “with a cluster of nine miscarriages within a 6 month span.” And it wasn’t just people who were suffering: “[T]here are numerous reports of goats, cattle, and sheep that have become barren; rabbits, cats and dogs giving birth to deformed young, or having persistent recent histories of miscarriages, dead tropical fish, dead bee hives, etc., and reports of deformed wildlife, and a notable decrease of birds and squirrels, and gardens that have mysteriously withered and died.”
The story had a familiar ring. This time the culprit wasn’t 2,4,5-T, but its twin, the other half of Agent Orange—a compound known as 2,4-D. Lorraine Carter reported that her community had been sprayed by 2,4-D and “a variety of other herbicides.” She told Costle she knew from the experience of those in other communities that these chemicals could cause miscarriages.
Indeed, inside the EPA, the dangers of 2,4-D were becoming increasingly worrisome. “Private citizens and environmental organizations from numerous locations throughout the country are expressing their thoughts and fears that miscarriages (spontaneous abortions) and birth defects in their communities are occurring in alarming numbers because of 2,4-D exposure,” an internal EPA memo noted. An EPA response officer cited examples of 2,4-D tragedies in the Swan Valley, Montana; Broken Bow, Oklahoma; Trego, Wisconsin; Ashford, Washington; and several locations in Oregon. He also made a case for undertaking a variety of studies for a better understanding of the impact of 2,4-D.
But nothing happened, largely because by this time the EPA was ensnared in yet another battle with Dow Chemical. And as had been the case with the battle over 2,4,5-T, there were both lives and hundreds of millions of dollars at stake.8
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The Five Rivers Deception
In July 1979, just two months after the banning of 2,4,5-T and just before the women from Mineral voiced their own worries about 2,4-D, three more Oregon women began complaining of spontaneous miscarriages and other medical effects from being contaminated by toxic herbicides.9
In July 1979, the EPA received a letter from five women, including Melyce Connelly, who lived in the Five Rivers village, not far from Alsea, in Oregon’s Siuslaw National Forest. The women begged the EPA administrator to ensure that two herbicides, 2,4-D and picloram, “cease to be sprayed until their safety has been unequivocally established, and that the miscarriages and the health of the population be studied immediately.”10
The women had a right to expect prompt and trustworthy answers to their questions. What they got was years of bungling and ineptitude.
In essence, Edwin Johnson, the director of EPA’s pesticide programs, asked his staff to repeat in Five Rivers what it had done in Alsea: test for dioxin contamination in samples taken from water and sediment as well as from humans and animals. Johnson’s assistants asked the Epidemiological Studies Program of Colorado State University—which was funded by EPA—to carry out the Five Rivers study.
On November 2, 1979, Johnson wrote a letter to Melyce Connelly assuring her that the water and sediment samples from the Five Rivers area “are being analyzed for 2,4-D, picloram, 2,4,5-T, Silvex, and dioxin.” In addition, he promised Connelly that she would “receive the results of these analyses directly, as soon as they are available.”
The EPA, however, did no such thing. Connelly received nothing from him or his staff. In fact, the investigation seemed designed to fail. Jim Weaver, the congressman from Oregon representing the women of Five Rivers, would later describe the Five Rivers study as “a morass of misinformation.”
The EPA “assured the residents of the Five Rivers area that they would ‘receive the results of these analyses,’ ” Weaver’s letter said. “Nearly four years later, not one resident has been notified, and the study remains unfinished.”11
Weaver told William Ruckelshaus, the former Nixon appointee who had returned from industry to run EPA again under Reagan, that he shared the Oregon women’s “frustration and anger,” and he demanded that the EPA hand over all documents related to the Five Rivers study. “Many Americans feel they can no longer trust the agency’s credibility or forthrightness,” Weaver said.
What happened next would hardly reassure Weaver, his constituents, or anyone else.
As promised, experts from Colorado State University collected their samples from the environment, the animals, and the women in the Five Rivers region and sent them to an EPA laboratory at Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. The samples included drinking water sediment and tissues from a mouse, cat, shrew, bird, and a “baby born without a brain.”12
The samples then traveled from Mississippi to Professor Michael Gross at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. But Gross analyzed the samples only for dioxin, because no one from EPA asked him to also examine the samples for 2,4,5-T, 2,4-D, Silvex, and picloram, as the EPA had promised the women of Five Rivers. Still, he reported, some of the samples had dioxin levels ranging from 160 to 5,800 parts per trillion.
Dr. Gross then sent the results of his work to the EPA’s dioxin coordinator in Washington, D.C., but it apparently went no further. This was an extraordinary lapse, considering the toxicity of dioxin and what was at stake for these women and their families. Meanwhile, Dr. Gross had to answer questions about dioxins in a lawsuit brought against EPA, so he released the results of his analyses.13
Then something strange happened. An ABC News investigation discovered that some samples contaminated with dioxin, which had been sent to the EPA lab in Mississippi, had somehow become mixed up with samples from another site in Michigan. How could this have happened? How had the samples been misidentified?
One version of how the samples reached their destination comes from a senior EPA official. According to Homer Hall, deputy director, Benefits and Use Division, Office of Pesticide Programs, EPA, Colorado State University scientists sent sediment samples from Oregon and sludge samples from Region V to Dr. Mike Gross at the University of Nebraska for analysis. The attorney for the plaintiff alleged that “this was all a part of an EPA coverup.”14
If the mix-up was frightening for citizens and embarrassing to the EPA, it could hardly be seen as an isolated example of bureaucratic mismanagement. The truth was, the EPA had made its mind up about 2,4-D before the Five Rivers disaster study had even been concluded. The EPA had evidence showing dioxin contamination in Oregon for three years, but they refused to release it because of the study’s certain effects on the regulatory fate of 2,4,5-T. With 2,4-D, there was too much at stake. Not because of threats to human health, but—once again—because of threats to industry profits.15
In episodes of finger pointing, recrimination, or blundering, bureaucracies always resort to official inquiries, and in this case the EPA conducted two in-house investigations. The Office of Pesticide Programs produced a report declaring itself innocent of all error and blaming the confusion over the samples on no one in particular. “The confusion of the samples from Five Rivers with those from Region V seems to have been a clerical error committed by the Nebraska laboratory,” an EPA report said. “While there was no actual mix-up in the identity of the samples themselves but only in the reporting of the results, this error is another lapse [in the investigation by the EPA.]”16
The Office of the Inspector General, drawing on an early version of the report of the Office of Pesticide Programs, also somehow found very little wrong with the way the Five Rivers study had been done. “It appears that (a) the samples were never analyzed for herbicides; (b) the TCDD [dioxin] analysis of the samples was incomplete; and (c) the people of Five Rivers had never been advised of the available results” despite repeated legal efforts to get them, an EPA report said. The regional office apparently never received the results of the analysis of its samples, and the mislabeling of the Region V samples as samples from Oregon “seemed to be a clerical error in an EPA cooperative laboratory; there was no actual mixup of the samples.”17
Once again, the constant shuffling of the EPA bureaucracy appeared to be at the root of the problem. John C. Martin, the EPA’s inspector general, pointed out that the reorganization upheaval of 1976–1980 contributed to EPA’s “failure” to adequately complete the Alsea Study or respond to the Five Rivers incident. But in a way, those reorganizations were not a failure, but a success: they succeeded in demoralizing, demoting, and removing the very people trying to carry out the EPA’s mission.
Once again, it seemed that every time someone outside the EPA warned about the dangerous effects of an enormously popular pesticide, EPA regulators would rush to defend it. Bad data was coming to the EPA not merely from the Five Rivers case, but also from the battle with Dow over 2,4,5-T and, almost simultaneously, from the Colorado organophosphate study. In a furious move, senior managers responded precisely the way industry would have wanted them to: they broke up the Health Effects Branch. It was a classic case of shooting the messenger: the Health Effects Branch was “reorganized” out of existence, replaced by an ineffective alternative, the Field Studies and Special Projects Section, designed to pacify industry (and especially Dow Chemical). By the time the Health Effects Branch was abolished, around 1982, it had twenty-five staff members. By 1986, its replacement had six staff members. The same decline struck another effective organization, the Special Pesticides Review Division, which investigated hazardous pesticides. In 1981, when Reagan came to power, it had one hundred scientists and support staff, and by late 1986, its staff numbered twelve. The Reagan administration knew how to demolish the effective parts of the EPA.
“Reorganization” is usually a messy process. Some win and others lose. But the Reagan administration made reorganization a weapon. Those who had the misfortune to report on the Five Rivers case were, in the logic of EPA politicians,
losers. The EPA simply could not handle such drama. Key scientists were exiled to greener pastures, far from the centers of power where real decisions get made. Vandermer learned the price of bringing senior managers bad news: retribution is swift and severe. He was sent to the U.S. Agency for International Development, which shipped him to Egypt, where for two years he evaluated pesticides in an AID-funded project. Jack Griffith, the chief of the Alsea investigation, found himself moved to the University of Miami, where the EPA was funding an epidemiology program.
“I suggested that, if we ignore the findings of the Colorado farmworker study [see chapter 6], which showed the brain damage effects of neurotoxic pesticides, we are likely to have more and more people with less and less intelligence,” Vandermer said. “For that they stripped me of my duties for two years. They also gave me an unsatisfactory rating for my job, which is the closest thing to being fired.”
Vandermer was furious. He was about to file a formal grievance when one day he was offered a deal: if he dropped his grievance, the EPA would pay his salary at another government agency or university of his choice.18 Vandermer accepted the deal.
Despite industry’s claims, the truth about 2,4-D’s toxicity is well known, and it has been for a long time. On September 26, 1983, S. M. Jalal, a professor of biology at the University of North Dakota, wrote a note to Edwin Johnson, the director of the EPA’s pesticides office. Jalal said he was “surprised” to learn that 2,4-D, an unusually common lawn care product, did in fact contain TCDD dioxins. An EPA study released a couple of years before Jalal’s note had concluded that the TCDD dioxin is a “likely” human carcinogen and may be “the most toxic chemical ever known to man,” with awesome degenerative power that could cripple, cause cancer, and kill experimental animals at “exceedingly low doses.”19
Poison Spring Page 7