Poison Spring (12 page)

EPA’s criminal investigation of Monsanto lasted for two years without reaching a conclusion about the studies. One result that was not in doubt: the EPA apologized to Monsanto for suggesting its studies were fraudulent, and then, in a vindictive fury, launched a harassing investigation into Jenkins herself.

“I don’t think Cate [Jenkins] should be involved with anything that puts her in direct contact with the regulated community or the general public,” an EPA manager said. “If we insist on retaining her, place her in some administrative or staff position (like Bill Sanjour) and not worry about whether she is happy.”
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Jenkins was made a nonperson. She was relieved of official duties, and for close to two years she was left without an assignment. On April 8, 1992, she was ordered to a clerical position.

But Jenkins fought back, filing a harassment complaint with the Department of Labor, and in May 1992, an examiner from the Department of Labor investigated Jenkins’s grievance. He interviewed EPA managers who had worked with Jenkins. “Cate [Jenkins] appears to be on a mission to eliminate dioxins,” an EPA official told the examiner. “Management has been too soft in the past in dealing with Cate’s activities.”
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The examiner, however, sided with Jenkins. He ruled that the EPA had discriminated against her for doing things allowed by the whistle-blower law. He rejected the agency’s arguments for giving Jenkins a clerical job and recommended that she be given her official job back and be reimbursed for any legal fees and costs she had incurred defending herself.

The EPA rejected the examiner’s recommendations and appealed his ruling to the Labor District Director, who agreed with the decision of the examiner. The EPA again appealed the decision to an administrative law judge.

At this stage of the conflict, Jenkins’s lawyers questioned EPA officials under oath and brought their own witnesses to testify about the character and achievements of Cate Jenkins. Out of this “trial” there emerged another picture of Jenkins: a dedicated and skillful scientist who had decided that regulating dioxins was worth fighting for and who had been ostracized by her own agency for the offense of carrying out its stated mission.

Jenkins, the court learned, had earned several cash awards for a performance that “exceeded expectations”; she had never been disciplined or criticized for her behavior in dealing with the public or the industry. Beyond this, her supervisor testified that he had spoken to Monsanto about her; another manager said he would not give Jenkins any assignment that involved Monsanto; another reported that had Jenkins not been on a “crusade on dioxins,” he would consider her a valuable member of his team.

One of the witnesses who praised Jenkins, John Thomas Burch Jr., was a lawyer and a Vietnam War veteran who headed the National Vietnam Veterans Coalition. Jenkins had made a real difference in the veterans’ struggle for justice, Burch said; she was the only government official who always assisted the veterans. Burch emphasized that Jenkins’s memos on the Monsanto dioxin studies “broke a roadblock,” triggering legislation that made it possible for thousands of veterans to receive medical care. The veterans had honored Jenkins with a plaque for exemplary service.

The administrative law judge also ruled in Jenkins’s favor, but once again the EPA appealed, this time to the Secretary of Labor, who also ruled for Jenkins. Finally, after wasting two years in useless litigation, EPA was forced to restore Jenkins to her official duties.
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“Although she had committed no crime, Jenkins had been vilified and harassed for the sin of wanting to protect the public from dioxin,” wrote William Sanjour, a colleague of Jenkins who chronicled the EPA’s dishonorable vendetta against her.

Many wrongs, including violations of EPA’s own regulations, were committed by those who illegally harassed her, but no one has suggested punishment for them. And while many EPA officials were willing, even anxious, to apologize to Monsanto, none has come forward to apologize to Dr. Jenkins.

When Jenkins made her allegations, and when the veterans groups made known the full implication of those allegations, a government with a decent respect for the welfare of its armed forces would have publicly ordered a full and impartial investigation with all the resources and support necessary and let the chips fall where they may. Instead, our top government officials were silent or even worse, they let it be known that they despised the messenger and had nothing but friendly feelings for the accused. The United States government gave no support or encouragement to a scientific, civil, or criminal investigation of Monsanto. No mere office director in EPA is big enough or strong enough to take on an influential giant like Monsanto without that support and encouragement.

The EPA “should stop running a KGB-type operation that tries to control anyone who calls attention to waste, fraud, and abuse by high-ranking officials and powerful private interests,” Sanjour went on. “The agency should pay attention instead to the message of these whistle-blowers. Failed attempts at suppression only increase the public’s distrust of its government.”
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Sanjour was right. Without a thorough government investigation of the Monsanto dioxin studies, we cannot say for sure that Cate Jenkins’s allegations were accurate. Yet the EPA was not about to challenge Monsanto. Even before Sanjour denounced the government’s complicity with Monsanto, another critic emerged—this one a central figure in the Vietnam War itself—and accused the federal government of covering up the connection between dioxins and cancer.

Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt was the commander of U.S. Naval Forces in Vietnam from 1968 to 1970. From 1970 to 1974 he served as the chief of naval operations and as a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. On October 6, 1989, he was appointed special assistant to the Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, and it was in that capacity that he reviewed all evidence regarding the health effects of Agent Orange on American soldiers in the Vietnam War. This meant looking over the studies carried out by the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Air Force, the Centers for Disease Control, and the Department of Health and Human Services.

For Admiral Zumwalt, Agent Orange was more than an abstract policy question. His son, Elmo Zumwalt III, who also served in Vietnam, was exposed to the defoliant and became (like many other Vietnam veterans) dangerously ill with lymphoma (a cancer of the lymph system) and Hodgkin’s disease. He eventually died of the diseases. Zumwalt’s grandson, Elmo IV, was born with a congenital dysfunction that hinders his ability to concentrate.
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Admiral Zumwalt accused the Centers of Disease Control of fraud, manipulation, and interference in carrying out valid dioxin studies. “The major federal government health studies on the effects of Agent Orange on Vietnam veterans have significantly understated those effects as a result of deliberate political manipulation of scientific data and methodology,” he said. Zumwalt became particularly angry with a physician and manager at the Centers for Disease Control who, he asserted, “has made it his mission to manipulate scientific data and procedures so as to prevent the true facts about dioxin from being determined.” Zumwalt was certain that the CDC manager was “politically motivated,” covering up the effects of dioxin exactly as the companies that produced them had done; the CDC valued “profits above other concerns.”
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The antidote to these misleading studies had to be research done by scientists funded neither by the government nor the chemical industry, Zumwalt said. He had reviewed enough unbiased studies to know that sufficient evidence existed on the harmful human effects of Agent Orange and dioxin—not least a 150-page summary report (done by Cate Jenkins herself ) called “Diseases Significantly Associated with Agent Orange and Dioxin.”

A month after Admiral Zumwalt’s searing critique, Jenkins sent her dioxin report to Robert M. Hager, a public interest lawyer in Washington, D.C. In her September 5, 1991, letter, Jenkins assured Hager that recent studies showed clearly that “humans are probably a more sensitive species to the effects of dioxin than animals.” This was in direct contradiction to the conclusions reached by the CDC and the EPA, who continued to work to convince the American people that dioxin’s dangerous reputation was overblown, especially when confronted with a number of litigation cases and toxic waste cleanup decisions.

The companies, and their allies in government, had reason to worry: in 2004, the residents of Nitro, West Virginia, sued Monsanto for the harm they had suffered as a result of the company’s manufacture of the Agent Orange chemical 2,4,5-T. The class action suit focused only on the dioxin by-product, accusing Monsanto of burning dioxin wastes in their community, spreading contaminated soot and polluting homes with unsafe levels of dioxin. In February 2012, Monsanto agreed to settle the case for $93 million.
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Meanwhile, Monsanto, Dow Chemical, and other companies continued to manufacture dioxins and dump them into the environment. By 2007—some twenty-eight years after EPA had sounded the alarm, and more than a century after the company began dumping dioxins into Michigan’s Tittabawassee River—Dow Chemical had already spent some $40 million to “study” its mess, but not much to actually clean it up. And there was a lot to clean up: one hot spot had the highest levels of dioxin ever recorded in the Great Lakes region. “We’re talking a huge area of contamination here,” said Robert McCann, a spokesman for the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. “It can no longer be argued that there isn’t a serious dioxin problem here,” said Ralph Dollhopf, associate director of the EPA’s regional Superfund office in Chicago. “There is no question about Dow’s culpability. It’s past time for this work to be done.”

Mary A. Gade, administrator for EPA Region V, assured the American people that the July 13, 2007, settlement would force Dow to clean up three “dioxin contaminated hot spots.” Gade spoke too soon. Just six months later, the EPA “cut off cleanup talks with Dow Chemical.”
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Although you’d think that four decades of battles over dioxins would have moved us toward a consensus on the cleanup of this poison, the truth is not so simple. And as bad as the Reagan administration was during the 1980s, when it comes to dioxins, the Obama administration has done little better. On May 26, 2009, Obama’s EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson, wrote that dioxin threatened both Michigan’s public health and its environment and promised that the EPA would release an official reassessment of the compound by the end of 2010, and during public meetings in Michigan, senior EPA officials explained agency plans to clean up Dow’s decades-old dioxin mess. But as usual, nothing substantive happened. Dow and the American Chemical Council, a public relations front for the chemical industry, asked the EPA to extend the comment period, and the agency obliged, telling anxious citizens to wait for a report from their Science Advisory. Meanwhile, Dow did what it has been doing for decades: lobbying Congress and the White House (to the tune of $12 million).
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Michigan residents were understandably disheartened. “It is completely useless to expect any government agency to reign in corporate polluters because the debate is endless, centering around the apparently controversial position that poison is bad for people,” a woman named Barbara Rubin wrote to her local newspaper. Another Michigan resident, Mike Lily, wondered who would ever be able to fight “Dow’s 12 million dollars in influence.” The result? “Another generation of children will be raised on a highly contaminated floodplain while EPA plays footloose and fancy free allowing Dow to steer the path forward.”
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And so it goes at the EPA. Two decades after she first blew the whistle on dioxins, Cate Jenkins is still fighting the good fight at EPA and still running into trouble with administrators. She was fired from the agency in 2010 after accusing the EPA of underestimating the health consequences of the toxic dust created by the attacks of September 11. Jenkins sued the agency under the federal Whistle-Blower Protection Act, and she was (again) eventually reinstated. “I think it shows to us that the agency was trying to get rid of her and silence her by making this allegation, and to go to the length of even a constitutional violation to get her out of there,” Jenkins’s lawyer said.
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To say the least, the suppression of honest voices like that of Cate Jenkins is demoralizing inside an agency that is supposed to be doing exactly her kind of work.

Chapter 4

DDT: A New Principle of Toxicology

April 29, 1982, was a hot day in Washington. By six in the afternoon I was exhausted, looking forward to my walk to the Pentagon, from where I would take Metro bus number 8 to my home in Alexandria.

On my way to the water fountain just before leaving the EPA office, I noticed, over near the Xerox machine, a pile of papers meant to be thrown in the trash. Curious, I looked over the small hill of documents, and in an instant I knew I had stumbled upon a little treasure. What I’d found was a stack of correspondence from the Hazard Evaluation Division, the group of EPA scientists who deal with the technical issues of pesticides. I grabbed as many documents as I could, put them in a box, and carried them to my workspace.

The next morning, an EPA official asked me to get rid of the papers; apparently his secretary had learned that I had taken them from the trash pile. “In any future litigation, we don’t want any of these papers to rise from the grave,” he said, looking at me. “The office of the general counsel does not think it would be a good idea for anyone to have copies of these documents. Please throw them away.”