The Global Citizen			  	        June 26, 1997

THE TOBACCO COMPANIES AREN'T THE ONLY ONES
So the tobacco companies have negotiated a deal that would limit their liability for the millions of people who have died using their product and would limit future public control of that product.
As the nation debates this deal, I hear people branding tobacco executives as somehow uniquely evil.  I've just read a book about a different industry that leads me to believe that they are neither -- not unique, not evil.
The book is Toxic Deception by Dan Fagin and Marianne Lavelle.  Its subtitle is: "How the Chemical Industry Manipulates Science, Bends the Law, and Endangers Your Health."  It's a stunningly documented account of the tactics companies have used when their products have been shown to be harmful.  Read it to understand the meaning of the term "junk science."
Fagin and Lavelle illustrate their case with four chemicals that are still in wide use, despite mounting evidence of their danger.  They will probably be the subjects of future negotiations, similar to but less spectacular than the tobacco one.
Atrazine, a weed killer applied to 96 percent of the cornfields of America, causes ovarian, breast, and other types of cancer in rats.  It interferes with the production of sex hormones.  It washes off fields and ends up in most of the streams, lakes, and wells of the Corn Belt.  It's even found in the rain.  The maker of atrazine, Ciba-Geigy, has waged a 20-year battle to deny the evidence of its harm.
Another herbicide, alachlor (trade names include Lasso, Bronco, Bullet, Cannon, and Lariat), causes cancer, liver degeneration, kidney disease, cataracts and eye lesions in test animals.  It has appeared in drinking water in Nebraska, Ohio, Ontario, Iowa, and Illinois.  The evidence against alachlor was enough to make major peanut-butter makers decide in the early 1990s to stop buying peanuts grown with the chemical (about half the nation's peanut crop at the time).  Canada has banned alachlor.  Our EPA considered a ban in 1986.  Fagin and Lavelle show how its maker, Monsanto, successfully opposed that ban.
Those two chemicals are mostly found in rural areas.  The next two are ubiquitous in the suburbs and urbs -- perchloroethylene, the favorite degreaser of the dry cleaning industry, and formaldehyde, contained in the glues that hold together plywood, particleboard, and other constituents of almost any recently built or remodeled home.  
"Perchloroethylene seeps and spills into groundwater, while its vapors invade nearby apartments and stores," say Fagin and Lavelle.  "Tests show that customers frequently bring 'perc' home with them in their dry-cleaned clothes."  For over two decades studies have linked perc with cancer and with kidney, liver, nerve, and reproductive problems.  Its makers, including Dow, PPG, and Vulcan in the U.S. and Imperial Chemical Industries in Great Britain, know all about those studies.  They have acted on that knowledge much the way cigarette companies acted on the evidence that smoking causes cancer.
Formadehyde seeps out of wood products into the air.  In the short run it can cause gagging and weakness, asthma, eye irritation, and respiratory problems.  In the long run it causes cancer in rats.  But company scientists (in this case wood products companies, such as Georgia-Pacific) keep pointing out that rats are not people.
The specific tactics the industries have used to keep these four very profitable chemicals on the market are slightly different, but the general strategy is the same.  It is the strategy of the tobacco industry.
Fagin and Lavells quote a DuPont internal document about Benlate, an agricultural fungicide that was inexplicably killing entire crops: "We will not be forced into admitting that we have found a cause and it is our fault.  It is a much better litigation position to state that we have looked, are looking, and will continue to look but have had no success ... than it is to have to admit that we have isolated the mechanism of injury."
And here is David Ozonoff of Boston University, who testified against asbestos companies, summarizing their successive arguments:
Asbestos doesn't hurt your health.
OK, it does hurt your health, but it doesn't cause cancer.
OK, asbestos can cause cancer, but not our kind of asbestos.
OK, our kind of asbestos can cause cancer, but not the kind of cancer this person got.
OK, our kind of asbestos can cause that kind of cancer, but not at the doses to which this person was exposed.
OK, asbestos does cause cancer, and at this dosage, but this person got his disease from something else.
OK, he was exposed to our asbestos and it did cause his cancer, but we did not know about the danger when we exposed him.
OK, we knew about the danger when we exposed him, but the statute of limitations has run out.
OK, the statute of limitations hasn't run out, but if we're guilty, we'll go out of business and everyone will be worse off.
OK, we'll go out of business, but only if you let us keep part of our company intact, and only if you limit our liability for the harms we have caused.
Sounds just like tobacco companies.  Sounds like chemical companies, nuclear power companies, fossil fuel companies, drug companies.  Sounds like the problem here is not any particular product or set of CEOs, but the very logic of business, which MUST defend its profits and products even if they cause grievous damage to the population at large.
That's why public regulation was invented and why it has to be at least as powerful and well funded as anyone who might make a profit from a product that hurts people.
(Donella H. Meadows is an adjunct professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth College.)