from november 28th 2004
blue vol III, #23
Book Review Archive
November 28 2004 vol3 #23
The Dioxin War
Truth & Lies About A Perfect Poison
Pluto Press, London/Ann Arbor/Dublin
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The Dioxin War
Truth & Lies About a Perfect Poison
 
 
 by Robert Allen
review by Tim Barton



"We're failing to deal with dioxin not because of any lack of information about its dangers to human health, but because of political and economic considerations."
- Dr Samuel Epstein, quoted in Greenpeace Magazine, 1991




Chronic Chlorine:

extracted from The Dioxin War, by Robert Allen

Published by Pluto Press

Dioxin, it could be argued, is a legacy of the twentieth century - a consequence of chlorine chemistry in the production of pesticides, plastics, solvents, detergents, cosmetics and other ‘essential' modern products. These products are all around us. If you live in a large industrialised city what do you see beyond the bustle of modern commerce, people moving, working, surviving? Cars, buses, lorries, trains and aeroplanes carrying people as they embark on their rites of passage. All these forms of transport are powered by a combustion process and built with industrial chemicals. What else do you see? Buildings, construction sites, machinery, glass, steel, concrete and treated wood. Look closer. Metals, plastics, electrical wires, pipes, paints, solvents, detergents. Go into the shops. Clothes made from synthetic fibres, fabrics treated with chemicals, electronic appliances made with strong durable plastics, cosmetics made from chemicals, stationery and newspapers made from bleached paper, food grown with the aid of pesticides, tin cans whose lining leaches chemicals into the fish, meat and vegetables they contain. If you purchase any of these items you will carry them home in bags made from plastic. Go into a restaurant, a public house, into the toilet, into the kitchen. Everywhere you look you'll see solvents, lubricants, refrigerants, detergents, soaps, shampoos, deodorants, cosmetics and plastics. Leave the city and go into the countryside, where monocultures predominate - vegetables, cereals, pulses and utility crops, where cattle and sheep graze on intensively farmed land, where farmers have planted chemically-treated seeds and sprayed herbicides, pesticides and fertilisers to increase the yields of their crops.

This technology, however, had its genesis in the eighteenth century when Swedish chemist, Carl Wilheim Scheele isolated chlorine - a pale green gas - from metal salts in 1774. It wasn't a momentous discovery and didn't make much difference to the world of chemistry until the invention of electricity began to reshape the world of industry. Suddenly industry realised it could reduce the costs of manufacturing some of its products. One product that benefited from developments in electrical engineering was caustic soda - which was used in the manufacture of soap and detergents.

As the nineteenth century came to a close the chemical industry discovered they could produce soda and chlorine by passing an electric current through a salt-water solution. The invention of the chlor-alkali electrolytic process revolutionised the chemical industry. But they now had large amounts of elemental chlorine - a by-product that might have gone to waste if Herbert Dow, the founder of the US chemical corporation Dow Chemical, had not made a significant discovery. By combining chlorine with chemicals made from hydrogen and carbon (the organic compounds found universally in plants, animals and humans), Dow introduced the chemical industry to a range of new, highly profitable chemicals - chlorinated hydrocarbons (organochlorines), which are also called halogenated aromatic hydrocarbons. Industry now had to find sources of hydrocarbons. Bituminous coal tar, which was formed during the production of coke, was valuable because it contained a range of aromatic hydrocarbons - benzene, toluene, xylene, naphthalene and anthracene. However, because the chemical industry's demand for coal tar products was growing faster than the production of coke - used primarily as a fuel in steelworks - the need to find other sources of hydrocarbons became imperative. In the USA during the 1920s and 1930s the extraction of mineral oil and natural gas provided chemical companies with that source. The petrochemical industry was born. Since the 1950s mineral oil has become the most important raw material in the chemical industry, along with salt.

Mineral oil - saturated hydrocarbons of different lengths depending on their geographical location - begins as a thick, sticky, volatile liquid. It is the task of the oil refineries to turn it into the various forms used in everyday industrial, commercial and domestic use as gasoline, diesel oil, light and heavy fuel oil and liquid gas. The chemical industry is only interested in the light gasoline - naphtha - which after processing forms the petrochemicals known as benzene, butadiene, ethylene, propylene and toluene, among others. In the years between the beginning of the 1939-45 war and the mid-1950s the chemical industry combined chlorine with these hydrocarbons to create a treasure trove for themselves. The products of the war machine, which had been rushed into production without any thought about their effect on individual species and the ecosphere, suddenly became products of necessity in the post-war world:
 
  • plastics like poly vinyl chloride (PVC)

    •  
  • organochlorine insecticides like Dichloro Diphenyl Trichloroethane (DDT) - which had actually been manufactured 65 years earlier

    •  
  • phenoxyacetic herbicides like 2,4,5-T

    •  
  • wood preservatives like pentachlorophenol

    •  
  • chlorinated solvents like perchloroethylene

    •  
  • liquid chlorine for disinfecting and bleaching - cotton for example

 
 Within a few years the chemical and petrochemical industries grew into giant corporations. Their ability to influence consumer lifestyles through clever and imaginative marketing of their products generated further growth.20 Suddenly, it seemed, communities and workers all over the planet had become dependent on the products of chlorine chemistry, significantly synthetic chemicals containing chlorine and carbon atoms. Without knowing it. But there was a price to be paid.
Rob Allen's book The Dioxin War, a kind of sequel / companion-piece to the earlier books, Guests of the Nation (with "Tara Jones") and Waste Not, Want Not, features case-studies from around the world. In each one the chemical dioxin has damaged health (whether through industry, as in Times Beach; Seveso; Union Carbide or the military, as in Agent Orange in Indo-China), and in each case he has tried to interview people on both sides who have been affected by disputes that have followed exposure. In the book a fair few workers, at various levels in and outside relevant chemical corporations or political bodies, show a genuine belief in the harmless nature of the products that have spread around. Some still believe they are harmless, some have learnt that they are not. Some were, as individuals, in the "spread the muck around as part of my job", but are also now in the "harmed by that shit" group. We must make our own minds up who knew what when, in so far as there is evidence to do so. But the overriding feeling is that the corporate polluters that are at the top of the stack are lying to everyone, public, workers, middle-management, and that it is very difficult to name them and survive the ensuing litigation.

"To those who bear the risk, exposure to poisons is a matter of life and death. Decisions about poisons which disrupt the basic mechanisms of life and the integrity of future generations raise profound moral questions. Society cannot afford to entrust such decisions to corporate or political entities that exempt themselves from the restraints of morality and ethics."
- Van Strum, in The Politics of Penta, Greenpeace, 1989

The above quote says it all really. It is works like The Dioxin Wars that will bring this issue to a head, as public exposure of these is very limited. Sure, "everyone" has heard of Silent Spring (yeah, not many of us at all really, but thankfully critical mass doesn't require "many" to know - just a few, and the right few, in the right place… and that is not easy either), but that was nearly half a century back, and DDT's been banned right? Well, not entirely, and not everywhere, and the effects don't magically disappear just because the powder ain't sprayed no more, anyway. The public need wider exposure to these issues. And they simply don't get that exposure. The media is fearful of being sued, when it wants to run the story in the first place. If they run the tale at all, they wrap it up in so many ifs ands and buts that most readers will completely fail to get the message at all, and if they do, it is rare that the story run names names or dares to show how the little tales of this little company just here who had a little mishap and lied a bit, naughty naughty, are frankly representative on every level bar one - they got caught and then didn't cover it up ruthlessly enough… And the "mishaps" are all too often standard operating procedure.

For example, many incinerators have too little fuel to guarantee running at the required high temperatures at all times, and so lower the temperature of the burn at night or at weekends on the grounds that no-one will notice - or at least no-one that matters, such as an inspector (who must often give notice if visiting). Some have been caught keeping two logs, a true one and the one shown to visitors - I doubt that this is not common practice, with the possible extra spin of having just the lying log in the first place, and simply not recording leaks, temperature drops, etc. It is also common for the filters, which need changing regularly, to be disposed of in ways that entirely undermine the point of filtering toxic shit in the first place, like by stuffing them in the local council landfill, to blow about and contaminate the water table, no names no pack-drill, but I could tell you a tale, involving the statistically spot-on evidence of horrific birth defects and throat cancers; courts ruling such evidence "merely circumstantial"; companies abusing this finding and slapping orders on anyone who puts their name and the word "toxic" into the same library never mind paragraph - but who dump filters in local dumps; national media organizations with video-tapes of this occurring, stack to dump, on flatbed trucks subsequently successfully sued for showing / reporting said tapes due to the court ruling above; et fucking cetera. These bans on saying their name result in less effective news pieces, as they are taken less seriously if names and personalities and locales are not in the tale - not a sexy story for Joe Public.

Robert must be frustrated as all hell by these restrictions on the freedom of speech, having as he must hundreds of these untellable tales. Few publishers would touch such a story, without a journalese being adopted that attributes everything to someone else and never comes out and actually says anything that is not in quotes; that contextualizes everything interesting in a stifling web of ifs ands and buts in the interests of some spurious definition of "objectivity"; or further panders to this dangerous version of "objectivity" that destroys the power of the argument, by then giving lip-service to the gainsayers and liars…

Pluto Press, who have bravely given Robert at least some head, have also succeeded in producing a rather bowdlerized version of what Robert really had to say. The book nonetheless achieves what it sets out to, especially if you read the notes, where much of the real meat is hidden away. At the end of it, you should be angry cynical and scared. And then you should want to act… And there's the rub? What the hell do you DO? Grab a gun? That's what you'll want to do, but of course, that won't get you very far. The highest level antagonists in this tale probably, ultimately, live on Caribbean islands sunning themselves and pretending to love their children and grand-children whilst making a world inimical to all life. So, OK, what in hell can you do?

Well, you could start by educating yourself, as no-one can see a path out of the wilderness without an indepth (if depressing) knowledge of the lay of the land. Robert's book is one of the many good places to start. Some of what is below is in there, and much much more...

Organochlorines, a chemical family that includes dioxins and furans, and that are persistent in the environment, have been implicated in many forms of cancer, birth defect, chemical sensitivity, immune deficiency, reduced fertility and feminisation… In common between these things is a severe reduction in the bodies ability to deal with even normal day-to-day toxic assault. Organochlorines, or many of them anyway, suppress the immune system. Thus, they are at the root of many modern maladies, and not only in humans or even mammals. In a recent news item in New Scientist, puzzlement was expressed over the radical decline in amphibians across the globe. The piece briefly mentioned pesticides as possibly implicated to some small extent, but the tenor of the piece was very much "But we really have no idea what the problem is!".

This is nonsense. The chemicals involved in at least some of the pesticides that "may" cause the negative health effects seen in amphibians are related to organochlorines. Organochlorines themselves are created elsewhere, too. For example in burning plastics, which are seen sending up tendrils of acrid black smoke all over the planet - and more importantly, usually not seen at all.

In western nations, where the law and enforcement agencies limit open-air burning of these substances, ironically even worse one are produced by, instead, burning waste at still higher temperatures in incinerators. These plants are intended to reduce the volume of waste as much as possible, and to kill germs etc, and tear apart the molecules that form toxic substances. However, it seems that many of the worst dioxins form after this process, as the substances in the flue of a waste plant cool and condense. There is copious evidence of the way these chemicals form, or how they travel across the globe, polluting areas as far away from the source as it possible to get, and of exactly how they act in the body…

In the words of the Greenpeace report, Body of Evidence, "One of the more notable consequences of technological development in the Twentieth Century is the dispersal throughout the global environment of thousands of chemicals that are solely the products of human endeavor. Only a fraction of these are made for commerce; the overwhelming majority are unwanted and often uncharacterized by-products of manufacture, use and disposal".

And here is where "political and economic considerations" step in to wreak their havoc. We know what chemicals are effecting global amphibian decline; what chemicals are rendering Great Lakes marine life inedible, and aiding their decline; what causes severe health problems in humans globally, and especially around chemical plants that leak organochlorines and PCB's; which plants they are; who owns them...

But the authorities and the owners of the chemical industry deny all knowledge and produce paid-for science to demonstrate that everything we know is wrong. They obstruct in the courts, saying, "Yes, that shows a statistical correlation, but you know, statistics lie and are just circumstantial, so, Gentlemen of the jury, you must ignore these facts as they must be ruled out of court". They pay for research, the researchers feeling beholden to industry by virtue of having a job because of them, and so the reports begin and conclude with the sort of interpretation of the facts that will best suit their pay-masters, forcing / allowing the courts to accept untruths on (literal) "weight of evidence", even if the reports are often, if read more thoroughly, actually quite damning - the anti-industry case just can never match, weight for weight, the sheer tonnage of "objective and scientific" documentation that industry can supply. The chemical industry will sue if you implicate them by name in anything at all, especially if the legal system and it's rich-property-owner clientele have agreed, on the kind of spurious anti-science grounds mentioned above, that precedent is set to ban our speech despite evidence - facts - knowledge... coming out of our ears. As Robert puts it, their "success was due largely to the industry's guerilla tactics and its ability to hire mercenaries", where "their" includes the authorities as well as industry. [p29]

So, a very recent piece in a respected science magazine can, decades after evidence was first produced to show how the post-war chemical industry has been causing a slow but growing apocalypse whose worst effects have yet to be seen, can still claim not to have a clue, really, why amphibians - a kind of hormone-replicator/immune-suppressor chemical canary for the planet - are in massive worldwide decline… Though, frankly, we may all be just a few generations behind the amphibians, it is apparently "cheaper" politically and - ahem - economically to allow things to get worse, in the full knowledge of what we are doing.

However, the long-term costs are of course far far worse if we do not act now.

But are we not acting? Sure, the global and national agreements on pollution control are glacially slow and unresponsive, but the reality is that the filters on plants, etc, have in fact become technically and potentially better and better - and at great expense too. So, industry and government are too slow to react, but they do react. They lie about what they are doing even while they tacitly acknowledge that there is a problem to address by acting at all - why? To stop a public panic? Well, possibly, but that does not sit well in supposed "democracies", unless you accept that the establishment cannot allow its constituent parts to be seriously altered by the mere Mobb - a position I believe to be pertinent. Because of litigation? Ah, likely that is the more conscious reason…

Perhaps some of the buggers even believe their own propaganda, that there is no problem really, just a bunch of over-reacting greenies as usual. After all, what better front-line priest than one who believes his own shit, whether the theocracy at the top of the stack snort at them in as much disbelief (behind their backs) as we do (to their face). Plus, the toxicology, whilst quite public now, came out due not to the lovely goodwill of industry, but was fought for and hardwon by local groups of affected people, and indeed perhaps one guy, Rex Carr, who achieved the honour of getting Monsanto to acknowledge a sorry list of spills, lies, and cover-ups - let's regard them as an outed representative of corporations' in general shall we?:

  • Monsanto dumped 30 to 40 pounds of dioxin a day into the Mississippi River during the 1970s, knowing that the chemical would get into the St Louis food chain via the river

    •  
  • Monsanto knew in the mid-1950s how to reduce the amount of dioxin being formed during the manufacture of its chlorophenols, yet chose not to implement the process until 1980 so that it could save money

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  • Monsanto secretly tested corpses of people who had died in accidents and not from illnesses in St Louis for the presence of dioxin and found it in every case, admitting that the chemical could have come from their Krummrich factory - where they manufactured chlorophenols

    •  
  • Monsanto had known for half a century that its products contained dioxin yet despite the risk to people using these products said nothing

    •  
  • Monsanto knew that 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T - the chemicals that made up Agent Orange - contained high levels of dioxin

    •  
  • Monsanto knew about the dioxin content in Lysol, a cleaning product made from Santophen - a Monsanto chemical, and said nothing, despite the knowledge that Lysol was used on children and dogs

    •  
  • Monsanto failed to notify and lied to its Krummrich factory workers about the presence and danger of dioxin in chlorophenols so that it would not have to bear the expense of changing its manufacturing processes or the loss of its customers

    •  
  • Monsanto knew that its business would be hurt if its customers learned that dioxin was present in its products, so said nothing

    •  
  • Shortly after a spill in the Krummrich factory, samples taken by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) revealed dioxin. Monsanto conducted its own measurements and discovered higher levels but they told their workers and the media that they had failed to confirm OSHA's findings

    •  
  • Monsanto workers were told there were no significant health problems in those exposed to dioxin, other than a skin condition and a reversible liver problem

    •  
  • Monsanto workers were never given any health information about dioxin even though the company knew that exposure could cause cancer, liver damage, nerve damage and other injuries

    •  
  • Exposed Monsanto workers were not told of the presence of dioxin and were not given protective clothing even though the company was aware of the dangers of dioxin during the manufacture of chlorophenols

    •  
  • Monsanto made every effort it could to conceal the presence of dioxin in its manufacturing processes

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  • Monsanto told the EPA that it could not test its products for dioxin because dioxin was too toxic to handle in its labs, yet senior management knew that dioxin was being used in its labs

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  • Monsanto had no adequate testing programme for the presence of dioxin and only began to implement a more precise dioxin testing method after the Sturgeon spill

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  • Monsanto lied to the Canadian government, claiming that its products contained lesser amounts of dioxin than they actually did

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  • Monsanto never warned its customers that its products contained dioxin. Management told one customer there was no detectable amount of dioxin in its 2,4-D

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  • Monsanto scientists deliberately manipulated the health studies of workers exposed to dioxin as a result of the explosion at their Nitro factory in 1949"
     
     - pages 23-24, The Dioxin War

Robert is himself an activist, not just a journo. He has been involved personally in many anti-toxics campaigns. This book potentially could have come out in one form or another at any time in the last decade. And more are there to be written on some aspect or another of the relevant elements of the world we live in, as so many aspects of it are tied in to changing the aspects you see here. And you will want to change them (there, of course, is another problem, especially as Pluto are a relatively small and political publisher - how many people who pick up and read this book will not already number themselves amongst those who want change and have their ideas how to get it?).

As an activist, Robert, therefore, has some ideas on what is to be done.

They don't get much of a showing here. Again, the publishing constraints, especially on word count, have been an obstacle here. But the tales he tells show communities engaging in the issues here and there. Many of those involved were already politicized, most were not. Some of them will take what they learnt the hard way about the world with them and on to the next flashpoint in their lives. Books like this may teach more of us without the pain and heartache. Critical mass can be reached. It is a learning process and little about the journey offers comfort. As Robert puts it:

"To know the dioxin story it is also important to understand how the chemical industry works, how scientists reach their conclusions, how governments and regulatory agencies function, how environmentalists agitate and how we as consumers ultimately fuel the system that is poisoning us."
- Robert Allen, The Dioxin War, Pluto 2004

This is the crux of the tale.

Too many people will use the enormity of the state and establishment lies as an excuse to just hide. Too many people will use the evident corruption of the scientific enterprise as an excuse to hide in some hippy dreamland, where science is evil.

That would, of course, be the wrong way to react.

We can learn how scummy industry and government often are. We can learn to take "facts" as presented by media and corporations with a pinch of salt, and if we really get it, can unpick when someone has facts worth believing.

Whether we apply our own intelligence to the way the lies are presented to find the kernel of truth; become experts ourselves; learn to apply Occam's Razor and other logical tools; learn to identify who is in whose pockets; learn the role of ideology in all this; learn who we should ally ourselves with and who will cause more damage as friends than they will if we ignore them; learn how we are complicit in all this as consumers; learn how the authorities will try to use that last fact to make us fail to act as we are "hypocrites"; learn how that is just bollocks, a way of trying to shut up dissent; etc... is up to us.

Robert's work offers one very useful tool in this battle - and remember, read the footnotes!

–   Review by Tim Barton



  1. Robert Allen is the author of Dioxin War: Truth & Lies About A Perfect Poison, Pluto Press, London/Ann Arbor/Dublin and University of Michigan, US, published in July 2004. Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com.

    Book Description

    This is a book about Dioxin, one of the most poisonous chemicals known to humanity. It was the toxic component of Agent Orange, used by the US military to defoliate huge tracts of Vietnam during the war in the 60s and 70s.

    It can be found in pesticides, plastics, solvents, detergents and cosmetics. Dioxin has been revealed as a human carcinogen, and has been associated with heart disease, liver damage, hormonal disruption, reproductive disorders, developmental destruction and neurological impairment.

    The Dioxin War is the story of the people who fought to reveal the truth about dioxin. Huge multinationals Dow and Monsanto both manufactured Agent Orange. Robert Allen reveals the attempts by the chemical industry, in collusion with regulatory and health authorities, to cover up the true impact of dioxin on human health. He tells the remarkable story of how a small, dedicated group of people managed to bring the truth about dioxin into the public domain and into the courts - and win.

    2.      

  2. Robert Allen is the author of No Global: The People of Ireland versus the Multinationals, Pluto Press, London/Ann Arbor/Dublin, published in April 2004. Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com.

    Book Description

    Ireland's economy has seen phenomenal growth since the 1990s, as a result of an earlier decision by the state to chase foreign investment, largely from US corporates. As a result, manufacturers of raw chemicals, pharmaceuticals and highly dangerous substances came to Ireland, where they could make toxic products free from the strict controls imposed by other nations.

    Robert Allen's book reveals the consequences to human health and the environment of the Irish state's love affair with the multinational chemical industry. The cost to Irish society was a series of ecological and social outrages, starting in the 1970s and continuing into the 2000s.

    No Global is a lesson for countries who seek to encourage multinationals at the expense of the health their population and the delicate nature of their ecosystems. It is also a heart-warming record of the successful campaigns fought by local people to protect themselves and their environment from polluting industry.

    3.      

  3. Incineration & Why It Must Stop!

    NB: The site has also been produced as a CD. This is a multimedia presentation, with more graphics as well as a soundtrack, and is available for sale. Within the UK the CD costs £10 [sterling] including p&p. International orders will be at £15 including p&p. Order via tim_decenter2. 50% of sales will be split between continued update of the material and maintainence of the BlueGreenEarth Collective's websites.

    The aim of the Tim_Decenter2 website is to explain how municipal waste incineration has been adopted by local authorities in the UK, and why it is an unsafe practice that must cease.

    Throughout the last two decades County Councils throughout the UK have had to address a continuing problem - what to do with domestic waste.

    It is the responsibility of the local authority to keep our domestic waste off the street. In the past much of this waste was sent to landfill. However, a combination of the lack of new landfill sites, and increasing awareness of the environmental hazards of landfill, has resulted in a need to find alternatives.

    Councils needed a solution that was affordable, and wanted one that allowed them to forget about the problem. Waste incineration seemed the perfect answer. Private tender meant that the local authority officers could wash their hands of day to day involvement in organizing disposal; large incinerators meant minimal amounts of land had to be found; and incineration was thought to be "clean".

    However, the waste that was burnt was massively under-regulated. And over the last two decades it has become increasingly apparent that it most certainly is not clean.

    Although the pollution from incinerators appears to have gone down greatly as world environment regulations have been tightened, the kind of pollution produced has altered. These "new" pollutants, and the viable alternatives, are the subject of the site. Data has been collated from various sources, including Robert Allen's Waste Not, Want Not, Guests of the Nation, No Global and The Dioxin Wars; Theo Colborn's [& John Myers and Dianne Dumanoski's] Our Stolen Future: How Man-Made Chemicals are Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence & Survival, and Paul Connett's work for CANK.
     





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