How to Sell a Poison Read online

  Copyright © 2022 by Elena Conis

  Cover design by Pete Garceau

  Cover photograph of woman standing in DDT spray © George Silk/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

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  First Edition: April 2022

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Conis, Elena, author.

  Title: How to sell a poison : the rise, fall, and toxic return of DDT / Elena Conis.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Bold Type Books, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2021047425 | ISBN 9781645036746 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781645036753 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: DDT (Insecticide)—Toxicology. | DDT (Insecticide)—Health aspects. | DDT (Insecticide)—Environmental aspects. | DDT (Insecticide)—Physiological effect.

  Classification: LCC RA1242.D35 C65 2022 | DDC 632/.9517—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021047425

  ISBNs: 9781645036746 (hardcover), 9781645036753 (ebook)

  E3-20220309-JV-NF-ORI

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Prologue: Fish for the Table

  PART I 1 Not Too Much

  2 Polio City

  3 Flies

  4 Production

  5 Economic Poisons

  6 Virus X

  7 Poisoned in Our Own Homes

  8 Medical Standing

  9 Delaney’s Clause

  10 Mosquitoes

  PART II 11 Don’t Call It a Poison

  12 The Poison Book

  13 Poisoned in the Fields

  14 A Ban

  15 The Birds

  16 Tobacco

  17 The Hearings

  18 Destruction

  19 The Ban

  20 Triana

  21 Assessing Risk

  PART III 22 Settling

  23 Hand-Me-Down Poisons

  24 Nested Study

  25 Disruption

  26 Delaney Falls

  27 Bring Back DDT

  28 Timing Makes the Poison

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  About the Author

  Source Notes

  Selected Sources and Further Reading

  For my family

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  INTRODUCTION

  In the summer of 1944 Robert Mizell was leafing through Time magazine when an article in the Science section caught his eye: censorship had just been lifted on one of World War II’s top-secret discoveries, a chemical called DDT.

  At first glance, DDT sounded mundane. It killed bugs. Flies, bedbugs, moths, roaches, dog fleas, potato beetles, cabbage worms, fruit worms, corn borers, mosquitoes, their larvae, and more. But a US Army official said that by killing mosquitoes, DDT promised to wipe out malaria. He claimed it would revolutionize medicine as much as the discovery of antiseptics had revolutionized surgery. Mizell, a top administrator at a university in Atlanta, clipped the article and underlined the bit about malaria. He attached a note and sent it to an old college friend, Robert Woodruff, the soft-drink magnate who ran Coca-Cola.

  “If the stuff is as good as reported, have you thought about the tremendous economic implications…?” wrote Mizell, who often advised his friend on business and charitable matters. “Maybe we should buy some cheap land. Say nothing about it.” In the chemical he saw gold: ranches, housing developments, vacation resorts, and golf courses going in where mosquitoes and flies once thrived. Many like him did. A journalist for Life magazine reported that where US troops were stationed in the South Pacific, DDT had “proved that it could easily convert a verminous hellhole of an island into a health resort.”

  When the war was over, DDT came home a hero. It entered a booming postwar consumer marketplace, where it became the solution to a long list of postwar problems. Farmers sprayed it on orchards, vineyards, and croplands and dipped whole herds of cattle in it. Developers erected new suburbs using DDT-coated plywood. Home owners moved in and decorated with DDT-slicked wallpaper. They sprayed kitchens to kill ants and roaches, dusted mattresses to kill bedbugs, and treated pets to kill fleas. Dry cleaners added DDT to their cleaning solutions to ward off moths. Hotel and restaurant decorators arranged bouquets of DDT-impregnated fake flowers to repel wasps and bees. City officials sent out cavalcades of DDT spray trucks to clear neighborhood streets of insects, and children ran behind them, playing in the mist.

  In just a few short years, the pesticide—a relatively simple compound of carbon, hydrogen, and chlorine, used with abandon—had come to symbolize our postwar nation’s capacity to vanquish age-old scourges with modern science and technology.

  Three decades later, it was banned.

  •

  The 1972 ban—technically a regulatory restriction of DDT’s approved uses—followed years of mounting protest boosted by a nature writer named Rachel Carson. Her 1962 book Silent Spring implicated all of the new postwar pesticides, DDT included, in an epic attack on American wildlife. DDT was a neurotoxin with a predilection for fat tissue and a tendency to stick around, or persist, long after it had been sprayed. It killed beneficial bugs, fish, and birds. Carson also speculated that its broad class of chemicals, the synthetic postwar pesticides, was responsible for the nation’s rising number of cancer cases. But she was mostly concerned with what DDT had come to symbolize to her: the nation’s rush to embrace quick-fix technologies without taking the time to learn about their unintended consequences, especially those that weren’t immediately apparent. Following high-profile hearings held by the nation’s brand-new Environmental Protection Agency, DDT left the market with as much fanfare as it had arrived.

  Then, a generation later, a seemingly grassroots movement rose up to call for DDT’s return. DDT’s defenders argued that the chemical was the best tool against malaria, which was resurgent in sub-Saharan Africa. They also argued that its harms had been gravely overstated. Rachel Carson was wrong, they said. It was time to bring back DDT.

  That didn’t happen, but when more than a hundred nations signed an international treaty in 2001 to phase out another class of chemicals to which DDT belonged, the persistent organic (that is, carbon-based) pollutants, they did carve out an exception for the chemical. DDT, the signatories agreed, was critical for public health, even if it was known to be toxic.

  •

  That’s DDT’s story in three neat acts: war hero turned pariah turned exception. For a historian of medicine like me, it’s a familiar story; it’s one I’ve shared with students many times. But the third act always nagged at me. Why was the late 1990s the moment when Americans suddenly started calling for DDT’s return? A few years ago I decided to try to figure that out. In a handful of emails and letters in a collection of corporate documents, I found an unexpected answer.

  In the late 1990s, public relations specialists for Philip Morris—the tobacco company—were compiling a list of the century’s most important and inspiring women as part of a stealth campaign to promote Virginia Slims cigarettes. Rachel Carson was on the list for her groundbreaking work exposing the dangers of pesticides such as DDT. At the same time, however, Philip Morris executives were funding an entirely separate campaign, one to bring back DDT.

  The tobacco industry had no interest in selling the pesticide, of course; it was trying to sell cigarettes. But it found DDT’s story to be a helpful scientific parable, one that, told just right, illustrated the problem of government regulation of private industry gone wrong. DDT, in this tale, never should have been banned in the first place. Companies, not liberal activists and politicians, should be trusted to make responsible choices. DDT’s fate showed what happened when government got in the way. To sell one poison, in short, the tobacco industry sold a morality tale about another.

  DDT’s story was also, for the tobacco industry, useful for a far simpler reason: it was a distraction from the accumulating science on the dangers of secondhand smoke. Distraction is one of a list of tactics that various industry players have long used to protect markets for their products. Distract public attention away from unfavorable evidence. Discredit scientists and evidence you don’t like. Distor
t findings so they say what you want them to say. Deny evidence that isn’t in your favor. These strategies take advantage of the debate and uncertainty inherent to the scientific process. They also capitalize on the sensationalist tendencies of our news media and exploit the public’s dependence on the media for its understanding of scientific issues. “Discredit a scientist,” advised a set of guidelines drawn up by a Philip Morris front group in the nineties, “but don’t spread the word yourself. Get the news media to do it.”

  This set of tactics has a much longer history than the last few decades. The tobacco industry first began sowing scientific doubt back in the 1950s to deny the then-emerging harms of smoking. It turned to public relations specialists who had just begun to develop strategies for the chemical industry, which was facing Congressional scrutiny. In the decades that followed, the two industries and their fellow free-market defenders—conservative think tanks and other sectors seeking to limit government regulation—doubled down and expanded on those mid-century PR efforts. In the process, they obliterated the US public’s trust in science. They stoked today’s climate-change doubts, GMO stalemates, vaccine fears, and COVID denial. They led us to the moment we’re now living in, a moment in which science is intensely polemical and politicized.

  •

  This revised understanding of DDT’s third act left me wondering about its first two. As I looked into them anew, I found material that complicated the stories of DDT’s postwar popularity and 1972 ban. And as I pieced it all together, the picture that emerged shed even more light on the contested nature of science today.

  In Act 1, DDT’s rise has long seemed to illustrate postwar Americans’ faith and trust in science and scientific expertise. Countless scientists and citizens certainly embraced DDT during and after the war, but many did so because they had to, or because they believed they had to. Those who were openly critical of DDT, meanwhile, often found themselves dismissed as ignorant or even mentally unwell. And while DDT spelled profits for those with the purchasing power of a Woodruff, its rise was linked to larger economic shifts that stripped people living at the economic margins of their land and livelihood, in the process eroding their trust in the scientific and government experts who promoted DDT.

  Act 2 has long been read as a moment that captures the ascent and power of environmentalism. But that account leaves out the economic forces at play behind the scenes. By the time environmentalists turned regulators’ attention to DDT’s downsides, the larger chemical companies wanted DDT off the market so they could sell pricier, patented pesticides. Tobacco companies wanted DDT out of farmers’ hands because it was threatening US tobacco sales abroad, where other nations were already restricting the amount of DDT permitted in products. Scientific proof of environmental harm shifted policy only when other interests aligned.

  Throughout all three acts, meanwhile, DDT’s manufacture, use, and persistence contaminated soil, rivers, creeks, and oceans. The chemical and its breakdown products entered food webs and human bodies. Scientists labored to disentangle its effects from that of other chemicals and aspects of modern life. Scientific uncertainty, paradigm shifts, and plain old pride and ego complicated the task. Citizens struggled to shield themselves or their communities from DDT pollution. Their battles often ended up in the courts. All the while, DDT built up in soils, waters, and bodies in amounts determined by the social and political forces connecting place, class, and race.

  DDT’s three acts, reconsidered, struck me as a story about how science and its practitioners—who once not just promised but assured us that DDT was safe—can be comforting to some people and suspect to others, not because they’re uneducated or uninformed, but because they see the world in a different way, and because they have every reason to. It’s a story of how science becomes the turf on which we do battle over differences of gender, race, economic power, and more—without ever admitting as much. It’s a story, all told, that shows why we fight about science—and why science has the power to divide us.

  Prologue

  FISH FOR THE TABLE

  On the outside, Clyde Foster kept it cool behind crisp collars, a trim mustache, and close-cropped hair. On the inside, though, he often felt like a stick of “dynamite” waiting to explode.

  Then one day he did. The spark was a story buried in that day’s paper: “Danger Seen in Eating Fish from Rivers.” A government survey of streams in seven southern states had found “huge” quantities of the banned pesticide DDT in a creek feeding the Tennessee River outside of Huntsville, Alabama. An estimated four thousand tons of the chemical lay settled at the bottom of a two-mile stretch of the creek known as the Huntsville Spring Branch. Fish in the creek, the survey found, carried enormous amounts of the pesticide in their bodies. The source of the contaminant was an old manufacturing plant at a nearby arsenal. The plant had been defunct for years, but it was still seeping chemical residues into the creek, which met up with the Tennessee at a bend in the river where the small town of Triana sat. Foster’s town.

  Triana was Foster’s town in more ways than one. His wife, Dorothy, had grown up there, and her family told proud stories of how it had once been a bustling place, with a cotton-shipping port busier than Huntsville’s, a hotel, and a saloon. But when Clyde and Dorothy had moved there in 1957 for his job at the nearby Army Ballistic Missile Agency, he was struck by the town’s deprivation. At the space center, engineers, scientists, and analysts like him prepped rockets for Moon launches. Fifteen minutes down the road in Triana, however, people still lived without electricity or running water.

  Foster, a soft-spoken man nonetheless known for his determination, decided to do something about it. He traveled to Montgomery to dig a copy of Triana’s nineteenth-century charter out of the state archives. He found a judge to reinstate the charter so that he could apply for government grants to rebuild the town. The judge’s order put Triana back on the map and made Foster, at age thirty-two, the town’s first mayor since the nineteenth century.

  By then, it was 1964. At work, Foster analyzed weather data at the missile agency, now part of the new National Aeronautics and Space Administration, for rocket launches. Nights and weekends, he brought Triana into the twentieth century, putting in streetlamps, hiring a police chief, and creating programs to give people a crack at the kind of secure, middle-class job he had himself. Gradually, the small town grew, reaching around a thousand residents by the late 1970s.

  But it remained poor. And for most of the town’s residents, poverty meant living off food from the land, including fish from the Tennessee River and its creek. Which is why, in 1978, the buried headline incensed Foster to the point where he lost his characteristic calm. “We’ve been eating the fish from that water for years and years, and we’re just now learning that it has all this DDT,” he said. “These are table fish, not trophy fish. These fish were caught to eat, not to show off.”

  Poisoned fish isn’t what Foster expected would set him off. At the space center, being Black meant an endless assault of discrimination and injustice. Social functions for white colleagues were off-limits. So were trainings, and therefore promotions. He faced the same as mayor when local whites asked him if he intended Triana to become an “all-Negro town.”

  As he started digging into the story of how DDT got in the river, however, a legacy of unmistakable racism unfolded before him. He learned that the US Army, which owned the land containing the former DDT plant, had known about the contamination since at least 1964. The Federal Water Quality Administration had known since 1969. The Environmental Protection Agency had warned against eating fish from the river for a whole year. But no one had told anyone in Triana. “If this community had been anything other than Black,” said Foster, “the circumstances would have been different.”

  But Foster had become mayor at the height of the civil rights movement. He had watched as the federal government stepped in to help desegregate Montgomery’s buses and defend Birmingham’s peaceful protesters, and then he had watched as President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts into law. He believed that someone in the federal government would make things right if they knew what was going on. And he had an in: he was a federal employee.