Poison Spring (6 page)

“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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”

Kempter was right. To this day, the bucket of worms remains untouched. This dangerous state of affairs essentially nullifies all reasonable efforts to know exactly the total volume of toxic chemicals farmers and lawn owners actually use.

Here’s how the agency tries to guess: EPA economists prepare annual estimates of pesticide usage. They subscribe to a variety of company estimates. They also have access to EPA’s “confidential business information,” which includes companies’ reports of the amounts of pesticides they manufacture. The EPA and USDA also fund surveys of pesticide usage. Out of all these numbers they come up with their own estimates, which they make public. But in no case do the EPA or USDA or private data companies include the massive numbers of pesticide “inerts” in their estimation of how much pesticide is used annually in the United States—or in the world.

For many at the EPA, inerts did not exist. They churned out color graphs that charted the annual volume of pesticide use and worked hard to convince themselves that pesticide use in the United States was in decline. These numbers were hard to believe.

In fact, inerts do more than hide the total impact of agrotoxins on the environment. Some of them are immediate threats to human health. Others—called synergists—are designed to increase the deadly effects of the active ingredients. They work by fouling mthe microsomal enzymes of the liver, which, left alone, would break highly toxic compounds into harmless molecules. But a pesticide with a synergist is like a killer with a machine gun rather than a pistol. With the synergist’s ability to knock out the liver’s lifesaving powers, the active ingredient—the killer gas, liquid, or dust—can cause a hundred times more devastation than it could alone.
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Piperonyl butoxide, the chemical that damaged Thaddeus Jarzabek’s eyes, is a very popular synergist. Every year, consumers spray something like 25 to 30 million pounds of this chemical, via 4,200 pesticide products manufactured by about 900 companies. Piperonyl butoxide is especially mixed with pyrethrins, natural insecticides extracted from the flowers of chrysanthemum. Pyrethrins and piperonyl butoxide don’t have a bad reputation, either separately or in combination, so mixing them is routine.

Chemists correctly guessed that this “inert” synergist would effectively destroy a pest’s natural defenses against “active” poisons. The combination proved to be a spectacular success, with skyrocketing sales of aerosol sprays, fogging concentrates, emulsions, dusts, and wettable powders for homes, gardens, factories, institutions, farms, and food processing plants. Yet two known carcinogens—safrole and dihydrosafrole—are involved in the manufacture of this synergist. In addition, the synergist itself is a cocarcinogen: when piperonyl butoxide is mixed with freons (fluorocarbons, which were used as propellants of pressurized pesticide poison gases), it causes cancer in laboratory animals. Serious concerns also exist that this widely used poison may give rise to tumors, changing the genetic stuff of life and causing lethal defects to the newborn and even chemical castration.

These chemicals show up in surprising places, such as the standard multilayer supermarket paper bag. Which means that when you use that paper bag to store food or carry your groceries home, you risk contaminating your food with piperonyl butoxide.

In September 1981, buckling under pressure from industry and the Reagan administration, the EPA aborted a five-year effort to regulate piperonyl butoxide, claiming that farmers need not worry about how much piperonyl butoxide remains on crops when the synergist and its pesticide carrier are sprayed “in accordance with good agricultural practice.”

Such policies inevitably kill; the only questions are when and how many. We don’t know much about the victims of pesticide-powered agribusiness because as a society we often refuse to heed the warnings of some of our best scientists.

One such scientist is David Pimentel of Cornell University. He has been studying American agriculture for half a century, and his studies have long highlighted the environmental and social costs of pesticides. Using EPA data from the early 1990s, Pimentel figured out that in the United States, pesticides cause 300,000 poisonings per year; worldwide, the number is more than 26 million a year. Every year, worldwide, pesticides kill approximately 220,000 people and cause chronic disease in another 750,000.
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As troubling as these trends are, they are more infuriating because we have known about these poisons for close to seventy years. In 1949, thirteen years before Rachel Carson alerted the world to the unseen dangers of pesticides, A. D. Pickett, a field entomologist in Nova Scotia, Canada, blamed farmers for a chain of deadly ecological reactions. Posterity, he said, would condemn us “as despoilers on account of the indiscriminate dissemination of poisons.” Man, he reminded us, is merely one in a vast multitude of species making a living on earth. “For thousands of years man accepted insects as part of the normal environment over which he had little or no control, and it is only within the last half century that we have actually made any real attempt to reduce their effectiveness as competitors,” Pickett wrote.

A beetle in Colorado, for example, had survived forever by eating only its host plant, the buffalo burr. But when settlers arrived and planted long rows of potatoes, the bug—now known as the Colorado potato beetle—went “berserk.” Farmers reacted by spraying their crops relentlessly, killing the bugs but damaging their soil in the process.

“Most people who know anything about natural history realize that in nature there are elaborate and intricately balanced mechanisms for limiting animal populations,” Pickett wrote. “In the case of insects this balance is maintained in a variety of ways, but mostly by the pressures exerted by the physical environment such as weather, by the availability of food and biological control.”

Pickett warned that the farmers’ excessive reliance on toxic sprays to control insects could end up “creating agricultural and nutritional problems with such far-reaching results that we cannot simply return to some previous stage and start over again.” Entire ecosystems, he said, were in danger of falling apart from “chain reactions that may have far-reaching results.”
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Pickett urged North Americans to return to an agricultural and food system that would render farm chemicals obsolete. We could grow crops primarily for “the purpose of satisfying man’s food requirements and not as a means of making particular human activities commercially profitable regardless of the overall effect on human welfare.”