Yet as always, relentless industry pressure took place behind closed doors—or through congressional phone calls. Once again, the EPA began parroting industry, claiming (without citing proof ) that there was no evidence that 2,4-D had any dioxin contaminant. Chemical companies began releasing reports claiming that 2,4-D was not only harmless, it helped reduce hunger; they cited USDA studies claiming that banning 2,4-D would drive up costs to growers and would thus make food more expensive for consumers.20
Invoking the USDA to defend industrial pesticides was hardly a surprising move. The USDA has a long history of releasing studies favorable to the industrial status quo. By the late 1990s, after the chemical industry’s sustained rhetorical exaggeration in defense of 2,4-D, the EPA had managed to restrict only some of its uses. Today, 2,4-D remains one of the most common herbicides in the United States. It is still in the farmer’s shed and the suburban homeowner’s garage.21
By the time of the Alsea Creek and Five Rivers fiascoes, the EPA was reeling from its mismanagement of toxic pesticides. It wasn’t just the miscarriages in Oregon or the effects of Agent Orange on Vietnam soldiers; it wasn’t just the results of a Colorado neurological study that revealed that organophosphate pesticides were very bad for people’s health; nor was it the poisoned drinking water discovered on Long Island or the shocking revelations of fake science for hire (both of which I will discuss later). But in combination, these overlapping crises caused tremendous unrest within EPA, especially as the Carter era evolved into the far more disruptive administration of Ronald Reagan following the election of 1980. The news from the Five Rivers neighborhood, coming to the EPA in 1979 while the agency was still in disarray because of the Alsea study, almost broke the camel’s back.22
Both the Alsea and Five Rivers studies became environmental battlefields, especially because the Reagan administration had just arrived in Washington, and Reagan’s political appointees at the EPA wanted nothing to do with the suffering women of Oregon. The mission of Reagan’s EPA was the protection of the industry, including Dow Chemical. This was hardly surprising, since the chemical industry had its fingerprints all over Reagan’s election and (later) his appointments to the EPA. Reagan came to power with a commitment to silence or abolish any government activity that might cause trouble for business. His primary environmental goal came straight from industry: relieve companies of all “regulatory restraint.”
Purging troubling science and scientists
Reagan’s choice to run the EPA, Anne Gorsuch, was—from this point of view—the perfect choice. Her first action was to decimate the EPA’s law enforcement attorneys. Gorsuch’s deputy, John W. Hernandez, soon compromised the EPA’s own scientists studying dioxins. Hernandez arrived at the EPA after a stint as dean of civil engineering at New Mexico State University. For most of 1981, 1982, and early 1983, when Hernandez was finally asked to resign, he put the power and prestige of his office at the service of Dow Chemical, the manufacturer of napalm and 2,4,5-T and a company that was used to getting its way inside the EPA.
In 1979, before Hernandez arrived in Washington, the EPA had concluded that the heavy dioxin contamination of the Tittabawassee River and Saginaw Bay in Michigan was the direct result of an influx of wastewater from Dow Chemical’s Midland works, a 1,900-acre manufacturing plant. EPA charged that Dow was the most significant source, if not the only source, for that dioxin pollution.23
As others at the EPA had done before him, Hernandez was interested in making Dow look good. He took the highly unusual step of giving the company a copy of an internal dioxin report prepared by Dr. J. Milton Clark, a scientist working for the agency’s Region V out of Chicago. This report explained the risks that dioxins and furans (highly toxic dioxin-like chemicals) posed to wildlife and humans in the Great Lakes region, including Michigan, where the Dow plant was located. The report emphasized the extraordinary low levels of TCDD, in parts per trillion, that killed or caused cancer in wildlife. Clark later said it was “entirely inappropriate for Hernandez to let Dow comment directly on the draft report.”24
More than anybody else on the EPA’s staff in Chicago, Valdas V. Adamkus, the acting regional administrator, was responsible for the dioxin report. He staked his reputation and political survival on its findings. “The toxicological calculations indicated a substantial cancer risk from the consumption of contaminated fish,” Adamkus reported to David Kee, director of the Air and Hazardous Materials Division at EPA headquarters in Washington. Yet amazingly, Washington’s EPA staff, while not disputing the study’s conclusions, suggested his conclusions be removed “in order not to alarm an overly sensitive public.”25
Hernandez was clearly aware of the findings of the dioxin report, and his decision to hand an internal EPA report to Dow was both inappropriate and irresponsible. Adamkus would later testify under oath that he was “disturbed, almost destroyed” that Hernandez would give the report to Dow Chemical—which, of course, was quite pleased with Hernandez’s decision. Dow now had a chance to censor the report, and it did—demanding in telephone conversations with senior EPA officials, including David Kee, that the EPA delete from the report all references to Agent Orange and the dioxin pollution of the Tittabawassee River and Saginaw Bay. It also demanded that nothing be said about the EPA’s Alsea study, or that dioxins cause cancer and birth defects, or that it was hazardous to eat fish from the Great Lakes.26
Hernandez clearly agreed with Dow. Under his watchful eye, the scientists of Region V had no option but to delete the offending information from the report.
News about Hernandez’s political interference—fighting for Dow Chemical as if he worked for the company, which in effect he did—became too embarrassing even for the Reagan administration, and a mass exodus from a humiliated EPA ensued. Hernandez (and others) were asked to resign because of pressure from powerful Democratic congressmen and senators. Reporters noted that Hernandez was accused of “ordering EPA regional staffers to cooperate with Dow Chemical in revising the report, which in its final version dropped a section concluding that Dow’s Midland plant was the major source of dioxin contamination in the area.”27
Anne Gorsuch—by then known as Anne Burford, after a recent marriage—was forced to resign after Congress cited her for contempt for refusing to turn over Superfund records. In her 1986 book Are You Tough Enough? Ms. Burford said she was only “following orders.”
“When congressional criticism about the EPA began to touch the presidency, Mr. Reagan solved his problem by jettisoning me and my people, people whose only ‘crime’ was loyal service, following orders,” Burford wrote. “I was not the first to receive his special brand of benevolent neglect, a form of conveniently looking the other way, while his staff continues to do some very dirty work.”
Rita Lavelle, the person in charge of the EPA’s hazardous waste program, meanwhile, was sentenced to six months in prison and fined $10,000 for lying to Congress about what and when she knew about her former employer, the Aerojet General Corporation, dumping toxic waste near Riverside, California. Reagan had dismissed Lavelle during congressional investigations into allegations of favoritism to industry and the failure to use a $1.6 billion federal cleanup fund for toxic waste sites. Although Lavelle was the only one charged with a crime, some twenty other high-level administrators resigned under pressure. “You have indeed violated the public trust,” the federal district judge told Lavelle. “The perjury offense strikes at the very core of the trust that had been conferred [upon] you.”28
Of course, while all of this was going on, the work of EPA scientists on critical issues like TCDD was forced to take a back seat. The political appointees either showed no interest in continuing EPA’s dioxin studies or diverted resources from the dioxin work to less hazardous and less controversial projects.
Yet even by the time Reagan came to power in 1981, news about the extreme toxicity of dioxins—especially given the damage done by the spraying of Agent Orange over the jungles of Vietnam—was already out. Vetera
ns had kept up their pressure for government assistance, and in 1979, Congress passed legislation mandating federal studies of Agent Orange.
But the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Air Force continued their deception, working on “validation studies” without even measuring the amount of dioxin in the suffering veterans. (Harvard’s Matthew Meselson, who had studied the effects of Agent Orange in humans, rightfully accused the government of wasting money on meaningless studies.)
The reason these studies were meaningless is hard to miss: government agencies, from the Department of Veterans Affairs to the Centers for Disease Control and the Air Force, knew that if a connection was made between dioxin and miscarriages in women in Oregon, the American victims of Agent Orange would have to be compensated. By the late 1980s, despite the convincing evidence the EPA had accumulated on the dangerous toxicity of dioxin, the federal government—especially the Pentagon, the Department of Veterans Affairs, USDA, and even the EPA itself—was still trying to downplay its own research. USDA and EPA suppressed information that might have threatened the marketability of 2,4-D, and the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs did their best not to compensate the thousands of veterans of the Vietnam War who claimed that dioxin exposure had caused their cancer or other crippling afflictions.
Product liability lawsuits over asbestos had bankrupted the Johns Manville Corporation, and the big chemical companies and their fixers in government were well aware of the risks such claims would pose to Dow Chemical, Monsanto, Uniroyal, and Diamond Shamrock, all of which had manufactured Agent Orange for decades.
In the end, Vietnam veterans finally lost their hope that the federal government would come to their aid. But in 1979, some of them filed a class action suit against seven companies manufacturing Agent Orange, and five years later, the companies settled out of court for $180 million. Very little information about the dangers of dioxins ever became public.29
The more that scientists inside and outside the EPA learned about the dangers of dioxins, it seemed, the more chemical companies learned how to convince policymakers that these compounds were harmless. These worlds continued to chart their absurdly parallel paths throughout the Reagan era.
On August 15, 1983, Reagan’s EPA issued its draft “Dioxin Strategy,” confirming what Hale Vandermer had said years before about the critical role of dioxins in Alsea, Oregon. The EPA stated clearly that TCDD came into the world during the production of 2,4,5-trichlorophenol (2,4,5-TCP), a basic chemical feedstock used to make several pesticides and herbicides, including 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4,5-T), Silvex, hexachlorophene, ronnel, and erbon.30
Now, though, the EPA went further, noting that TCDD’s acute toxicity kills animals at “lower levels than any other man-made chemical.” In addition, TCDD initiates and promotes cancer at a potency 17 million times greater than that of benzene, 5 million times greater than carbon tetrachloride, and a hundred thousand times greater than PCBs. TCDD also bioaccumulates in animals at dramatic rates: twenty thousand times greater than benzene, six thousand times greater than carbon tetrachloride, and four times greater than PCBs.31
Given that dioxin-laced weed killers had been used all over America for decades, in other words, the prospect for dioxin-induced cancer or other diseases had become too big a worry for the EPA to ignore. The agency warned its regional cleanup crews to be exceptionally cautious whenever they detected dioxin contamination above one part per billion. This may sound like a small amount, but consider this: one part TCDD per trillion—which is a thousand times smaller than 1 part per billion—is still toxic enough to mutate living entities such as chicken embryos.
Yet despite the mounting evidence, chemical giants continued to deny the problems associated with their products and continued to harass and demonize anyone at the EPA who suggested these compounds be regulated. If Dow Chemical set the pace for this performance, another chemical behemoth, Monsanto, was not far behind.
Monsanto had produced 2,4,5-T in Nitro, West Virginia, for about twenty years, ending in 1971. The company also used its Nitro plant for more than fifty years to make rubber, herbicides, and numerous other chemicals. In 1949, an explosion in the factory had contaminated workers with dioxin. Thirty years later, in 1979, a train derailed in Sturgeon, Missouri, and spilled 19,000 gallons of chlorophenol, a dioxin compound that Monsanto used in making wood preservatives. In the 1980s, Monsanto would use these incidents for two company-sponsored studies purporting to show that dioxin exposure did not cause cancer in workers.
The workers were not so sure. Frances Kemner and other Monsanto employees exposed to chlorophenol in 1979 sued the company in a Missouri court in 1980. Their lawyers accused Monsanto of (among other things) lying to the EPA about the dioxin in its wastes and lying to workers about the existence of dioxin in its chlorophenol factory. Monsanto had had the technology for making chlorophenol with less dioxin but did not do so until after the 1979 Missouri accident; from 1970 to 1977, the company dumped 30 to 40 pounds of dioxin a day into the Mississippi River, and they sold products (including Lysol and Weed-B-Gon), all contaminated by dioxin, for more than thirty years.
During the trial, which lasted four years, the paucity of research on the links between dioxin and cancer in humans persuaded the jury to absolve Monsanto of responsibility for causing workers’ cancer. But it did find the company guilty of arrogance and willful negligence, fining it more than $16 million in punitive damages.
News of the Missouri trial of Monsanto eventually got to Cate Jenkins, an EPA scientist with a doctorate in chemistry who joined the EPA in 1979, the same year I arrived. A few years later she became a whistle-blower for the first time: in 1988, she wrote letters to congressional leaders about corruption in the relationship between EPA and the wood-preserving industry.32
The wastes of that industry are laced with dioxin, Jenkins had learned, and when she came across the Monsanto case, she became suspicious about the company’s dioxin studies. She went over the Monsanto studies with a fine-tooth comb and found significant deficiencies in both their design and their conclusions. She immediately concluded that the studies had been tampered with.
She had reason to worry. The EPA’s own studies, remember, had showed that dioxin was “the most toxic chemical ever known to man.”33
On February 23, 1990, she sent a memo to Raymond C. Loehr, chairman of the executive committee of the Science Advisory Board of the EPA, suggesting that the Monsanto studies were fraudulent.34 The Kemner Brief, she said, alleged that Monsanto deliberately cooked its data, altering research to “prove to the world that the only health consequence of dioxins was the relatively harmless, reversible [skin] condition of chloracne.”
Jenkins hoped that EPA scientists would audit the Monsanto studies—and other dioxin research—for fraud. She urged the advisory board to focus on studies done by the industry in order to “determine whether misclassification of medical records or other errors has resulted in similarly flawed conclusions.” Jenkins suspected that companies doing research on their own workers “would be particularly prone to bias,” for the obvious reason that any evidence that a company product caused an employee cancer could mean hefty, asbestos-sized lawsuits.
Jenkins’s memo set off alarm bells inside EPA, and someone in the agency inevitably leaked the memo to Monsanto. On October 1, 1990, James H. Senger, Monsanto’s vice president, sent a letter to Donald Clay, EPA assistant administrator for solid waste and emergency response, furious at what he termed “baseless charges.” The Monsanto studies, he said, had a “science-based focus.” Senger also complained that the “untrue allegations” repeated in the EPA memo cause “extreme prejudice” against Monsanto. “I wish to stress,” Senger said to Clay, “that Monsanto believes the charges against the two [Monsanto] studies [by Cate Jenkins] are utterly without merit.” Finally, Senger urged Clay to have the EPA audit those two studies and publish the results of the audit in a scientific journal.
While Monsanto was trying to convince the EPA of Jenkins’s misdeeds, the EPA started a criminal investigation of Monsanto, led by EPA agents John West and Kevin Guarino from EPA’s National Enforcement Investigations Center in Denver. On November 15, 1990, Cate Jenkins explained her conclusions in a memo to the investigators.35
First of all, she said, the EPA relied on Monsanto’s dioxin studies in everything it did. The result, naturally, was that the EPA failed to acknowledge that dioxins cause cancers or any other serious health effects other than chloracne. This meant the EPA utterly underestimated the danger of dioxin-contaminated products such as the wood preservative pentachlorophenol and the weed killer 2,4-D.
Second, Monsanto alone was responsible for the falsification of the dioxin studies. Given that the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences had partially funded one of the Monsanto studies, EPA investigators could charge Monsanto with “fraudulent use of government funds,” Jenkins said. Third, internal Monsanto documents that came to light during employee testimony revealed that Monsanto had known since the 1960s that some of its products (including the Agent Orange weed killers, 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D, pentachlorophenol, and the disinfectant Lysol) were contaminated by dioxin.
Moreover, Monsanto subverted its own dioxin studies by covering up the neurological diseases suffered by workers exposed to the compound; excluding workers with cancer from its studies; and even adding dioxin-exposed workers to the “control” group of its studies.
On January 24, 1991, Jenkins sent another memo to West and Guarino, again stressing Monsanto’s overwhelming influence on weakening the EPA’s regulation of dioxins in air, water, pesticides, and waste programs.36
The implications of these findings were far-reaching. Perhaps most obviously, the EPA’s Monsanto-influenced dioxin policy effectively discouraged litigation against Monsanto. But the Department of Veterans Affairs had also used the EPA’s compromised dioxin findings to deny compensation to veterans exposed to dioxin during the Vietnam War. (Australia and New Zealand did the same thing to their own war veterans.) The White House had ordered the Centers for Disease Control to reject veterans’ claims that their cancers had anything to do with their exposure to dioxin during the war.
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