Today we are living in a laboratory where the cancer victim must prove that his or her illness is the “direct result” of having been exposed to one of the many toxic chemicals that are spewn into our air and water, sprayed upon our food and forests, and that inundate many of the places where we work. In the name of science we seem to have banished common sense to the dustbin of “anecdotal evidence,” allowing multinational chemical companies to tamper dangerously with the ecology of our planet and the health of future generations.
Vietnam veterans came home believing they could eventually forget the horrors of guerilla warfare and live long and productive lives. Unfortunately, for thousands of veterans the past decade has been the latency period during which dioxin would begin to slowly and then more rapidly attack their enzyme systems, damage their livers, weaken their hearts, and induce various types of cancers that would eventually destroy their young bodies. Yet it would appear that, more than three decades after 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D were first developed and marketed for commercial use and twenty years after the first defoliation mission, no institutes will be established to house scientists who might wish to examine the effects of herbicides on human health. Nor have any chairs been endowed at universities for the study of TCDD-dioxin on human beings, and it appears that no agency comparable to NASA will be funded to pay the salaries of the world’s best scientific minds while they seek to discover just what is responsible for the maiming and killing of thousands of veterans.
“One need only to look toward the efforts of the National Cancer Institute, and its Asbestos Information Program, or the American Cancer Society and its information on smoking, or the diethylstilbestrol programs that exist nationwide.” Dr. Jeanne Stellman, associate professor of public health at Columbia University, told the Veterans’ Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives, “to see what can be done if the national will, energy, and commitment are present. Surely our veterans and their service organizations, the people who served our nation at the peril of their lives, they and their families deserve the finest in research, in outreach, in information, in medical care that our country can put forth. Only minimal effort has thus far been forthcoming.”20
Outside it is raining, and the sky has turned the color of a well-ripened plum. Dr. McNulty appears tired, his cough has gotten worse, and the frequency with which he glances at his watch leads me to conclude the interview has gone on long enough. As we shake hands and prepare to leave his office I ask if he would be willing to say that 2,4,5-T should be taken off the market altogether.
“Well,” he replies, “it’s toxic enough that common sense would say the less the better. As far as exposure to dioxin can be avoided, it should be. And I’ll broaden that to say to the class of compounds which all appear to act alike, and that includes the dioxins and the polychlorinated dibenzofurans which are present in pentachlorophenol.[22] It’s a much bigger source of dioxin here in Oregon than 2,4,5-T. I’m willing to say what my data is to anybody at any time, provided it has passed the gauntlet and has been accepted—that is, published—by my peers. That’s no problem. I’ll do that for anybody. And if I thought there was a social danger from it, then I would feel a personal obligation to speak out. But I can’t do that just because I know dioxin is toxic and I treat it with extreme caution around here. I can’t leap to a conclusion that I feel is unwarranted on a scientific basis, that it all ought to be stopped. That’s always subject to revision, the way science is. There may be something next year or next month that will change my mind completely on that.”
10. The Vietnamization of America
During the height of the war in Vietnam, television crews, newspaper reporters, and freelance writers followed American and Vietnamese troops into jungles, through swamps, and up mountains. Between toothpaste and shampoo commercials, Americans could watch helicopters strafe “enemy strongholds,” see young Marines returning from an ambush or firefight, and watch the wounded being evacuated or the enemy dead counted following a battle. News coverage of the Vietnam War was so extensive, in fact, that some cynics began referring to the war as a “media event.”
But what Americans did not see during the late sixties or throughout the seventies was the war being waged on their own environment, sometimes right in their own backyards. There were no crews from CBS to witness the Forest Service’s spraying of Bob McKusick’s homestead near Globe, Arizona, in 1968: nor were reporters on hand to observe Boston Edison’s spraying of herbicides near a heavily populated suburb south of Boston in August 1979. When the Long Island Rail Road, without notifying the residents along its rights-of-way, doused homeowners’ gardens and children with toxic herbicides, it didn’t even make the local news. Like the troops in Vietnam, those who lived near national forests, power-line and railroad rights-of-way, or privately owned tree farms had been told—if they were told anything—not to worry; herbicides were harmless.
From 1965 until 1970, when the spraying of Agent Orange was suspended in Vietnam, the US military covered approximately five million acres of Vietnam with herbicides. During those same years, ranchers, farmers, and the Forest Service sprayed 4.1 million acres of the American countryside annually with 2,4,5-T. The Forest Service alone sprayed more than 430,000 acres of national forest every year with 2,4,5-T in an attempt to kill broadleaved plants that might block sunlight from pine and other coniferous saplings. Ranchers used 2,4,5-T to destroy anything that might interfere with livestock grazing, while rice growers sprayed it on about one hundred thousand acres, primarily in Arkansas and Mississippi, to kill parasite weeds like arrowhead, gooseweed, and ducksalad. In 1970, the USDA announced a set of limited restrictions on the use of 2,4,5-T; however, although the ban affected only about 20 percent of all 2,4,5-T used in the United States, Dow Chemical went to court, obtaining an injunction to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from further regulations until more testing was done.[23] Until 1979, when the EPA’s temporary and limited suspension order (which excluded rangelands and rice plantations) was issued, 2,4,5-T had been the most widely used herbicide in the country.
When the National Forest Service first sprayed Bob McKusick’s land, he had no idea that herbicides could be harmfuclass="underline" “The first time was in 1968. The kids were little, and we were out on the clay deposit in Kellner Canyon with two dogs, just standing there on my properly. A helicopter came across—and we’re in plain sight—and we tried to wave it off but the spray drifted down on top of us. I had no reason to believe it was harmful because the Forest Service said it was completely harmless to birds and animals and humans and it just worked on brush. But it caused a rash, and my dog, Coyote, got pneumonia and almost died. A few months later he did die. I notified the Forest Service that we’d been sprayed, but I didn’t know the stuff was bad.”1