How to Sell a Poison

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.

He picked up the phone and began making calls. Within a week, he was sitting in a meeting with scientists from two federal agencies, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the Center for Disease Control (CDC). The TVA, created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt back in the thirties to spur economic development in the area, urged Alabama officials to ban any further fishing. The CDC agreed to start testing fish stored in residents’ freezers to determine exactly how much DDT the people in Triana had already consumed.

The pesticide was, in chemical terms, a chlorinated hydrocarbon, a compound containing chlorine atoms attached to carbon rings trimmed with hydrogen. DDT’s particular arrangement of atoms gave it staying power: when sprayed on crops or trees, it stuck around. It was also fat soluble, which meant that it lingered in the fat of living things. In food chains, this meant that as DDT “bioaccumulated” in individual organisms, it also biomagnified, building up even more in organisms higher up in the food chain as they consumed all the DDT eaten by organisms below them on the chain.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had thus long before set limits, officially called tolerances, on the amount of DDT allowable in the US food supply. But when a family caught its dinner from a nearby river, those tolerances were all but meaningless. The CDC’s initial tests revealed that residents were eating fish with DDT levels fifty times higher than what the FDA considered safe. A second round of tests, by the TVA, found fish with ninety times the safe level.

Foster knew that the people of Triana ate hundreds of pounds of fish each week; Dorothy cooked more than six pounds a week for their family alone. With that much fish in their diet, he knew that they all had the chemical in their bodies. What he wanted to know next was how much—and what, exactly—it was doing to them.

The CDC was also curious. The agency’s own scientists had vouched for DDT’s safety back in the forties and fifties, but scientific thinking on chemical risks had changed since then. The agency also had amends to make: just a few years before, it had settled a lawsuit with participants in its long-standing “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” carried out long after the vicious disease was actually treatable. Now the agency quickly dispatched an epidemiologist from its Atlanta headquarters.

Kathleen Kreiss, a careful Radcliffe grad from Nebraska with glasses and a middle part, traveled to Triana to collect samples. She took blood from Foster’s wife, Dorothy; his police chief, Joe Fletcher; a town elder named Felix Wynn; and nine others. Back in Atlanta, she found that all twelve residents had as much, or more, of the pesticide in their blood as did DDT factory workers, who, until Triana, were thought to have the highest DDT levels in the world. Worse, some of the residents had more—much more. Eighty-three-year-old Wynn had four times more DDT in his body than the highest level ever recorded in any human. And neither he nor any of the others had ever worked at the arsenal plant.

Wynn and the others received their results by mail, on official letterhead from the CDC. No studies, the letters assured them, had ever found any health problems in DDT factory workers. But Kreiss, troubled by the findings, traveled back to Triana to meet with the group in person. She wanted to personally reassure them that all Americans had some DDT in their body because the pesticide had been sprayed on so many farms, fields, and towns for so long. And because no studies had ever found any significant health problems from DDT in the US population—or even in highly exposed factory workers—it was very likely that the people of Triana were going to be just fine.

But the people were far from convinced. The news that you had enormous amounts of DDT in your body “did something to you mentally,” said Fletcher. “It drained you down. You’d be out walking, and all of a sudden it would hit you that you had this stuff in your blood—kind of like cancer.” Everyone knew that DDT was a banned chemical. Six years earlier, President Richard Nixon’s newly formed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had pulled it off the market following highly publicized, years-long hearings. Announcing the ban, EPA head William Ruckelshaus had cited evidence that DDT harmed wildlife and carried a risk of cancer in people. News reports on the hearings had announced that DDT possibly caused other problems, too, including hormonal imbalances and birth defects. All of this made the CDC’s reassurances hard, if not impossible, to trust.

Foster asked Kreiss for her support in asking the CDC to set up a full-time research center in Triana. In less time than it took to get his town’s old charter reinstated, the agency agreed. From a scientific standpoint, the question of DDT’s harms to humans was a still-unsettled one despite the studies of factory workers, and Triana offered a unique opportunity to understand DDT’s risks. The town, a local magazine announced, was going to “make medical history by providing the first massive data on the effects of long-term exposure to DDT in human beings.”

Those answers, however, would prove to be a long way off—longer, certainly, than anyone imagined at the time. In the meantime, Triana became a battleground for a scientific dispute over just how toxic the banned chemical actually was. Its noxious effects on wildlife were well-known. But Olin Chemical Corporation, the company that had acquired the company that had long run the plant on the arsenal, insisted that DDT was no more dangerous to people than table salt. World-famous toxicologists, experts in the harm that chemicals do to living things, agreed. Epidemiologists and risk scientists insisted that they were wrong, that the risks of long-term harm were potentially real. Medical tests on the people of Triana continued, and they came back inconclusive. Nobody, said Fletcher, seemed to know the truth about DDT.

In the meantime, Triana residents needed to figure out how to live with a painful paradox of American life. They had been living in nineteenth-century conditions while a twentieth-century chemical had made its way into their water, their food supply, and their bodies.

As they struggled to adapt to the contaminant within, DDT continued to leach from the site of the plant. Whole crystals were visible on the banks of the creek. DDT’s slightly sweet smell permeated the air. It continued to accumulate in the sediment of the river and the bodies of fish and birds that seemed to somehow survive it. But their survival offered little comfort to Marvelene Freeman, who owned a local grocery store and whose five children all tested positive for high levels of DDT.

“This used to be a lively little town,” she said. “But this problem has changed everyone’s attitude. We’re like prisoners on death row, just waiting to die.”

Chapter 1

NOT TOO MUCH

Victor Froelicher had prospered during the Great Depression. The Swiss-born chemist and his wife, Helen, bought a gracious new slate-roofed home on a tree-lined street in Ridgewood, New Jersey, just outside of New York City. They raised five children on its half-acre lawn and hosted endless events within its plastered halls: holiday socials, buffet lunches, community meetings, and concerts. Victor played the organ and directed their church choir; Helen raised funds for charity. Their lives felt full and generous.

Froelicher owed his prosperity to the Textile Dyeing and Printing Company, which had a plant in nearby Fair Lawn, where he was chief chemist. Textiles were big business; even during the Depression their production and consumption rose. As the national economy recovered, though, struggles between management and unions rattled the company. In 1938 the Fair Lawn plant shuttered, and Froelicher was out of work. He traveled back to Switzerland, leaving his family behind, in hopes of finding new work to support them. Before a year had passed, he was back in the states with a new job: he was the US representative for the reputable Swiss chemical company J.R. Geigy, which had been looking to expand its reach into the US market for decades.

Geigy was one of the oldest and most successful of the big dye companies in Europe, founded all the way back in 1758, when it began as a manufacturer and trader of not just dyes but also spices, drugs, and other chemicals. A century later, the company joined a pack of German firms that began making dyes and drugs from coal tar, an abundant waste product of the Industrial Revolution. It was a booming business. By the late 1800s, Geigy had sales offices in Europe, Asia, and North America. In the early 1900s, Geigy began setting up plants in the United States. By the late 1930s, just as the Textile Dyeing and Printing Company was shutting down in Fair Lawn, Geigy was closing its own plant in Jersey City but only to build a much bigger plant in Bayonne. The company also had plans to erect a research lab next door to the new Bayonne plant.

This new plant, Geigy planned, would focus on the next big thing in chemistry: compounds that killed insect pests. Insects had assumed pest-scale proportions for more than half a century by then. Massive changes in US farming and transportation in the late nineteenth century had invited a long list of destructive bugs: the Colorado potato beetle, boll weevil, gypsy moth, codling moth, cotton army worm, plum curculio, and countless others. White cabbage butterflies destroyed cabbage crops. Joint worms wiped out wheat crops. Rocky Mountain locusts devastated just about everything in their paths, sometimes swarming so thick that they slowed trains on newly laid tracks. Farmers picked insects off plants by hand, shook them off with wheeled carts, and crushed them with blocks and bricks. They loosed natural parasites and predators of the pests, sometimes creating bigger problems in the process. Desperate, they also applied poisonous chemicals, especially lead arsenate and the copper-arsenic compound known as Paris Green.

The poisons were effective. Straight arsenic killed the cereal-destroying army worm. A sprinkling of Paris Green could kill half the locusts in a field. They had just one problem: their residues clung to crops. And on crops eaten fresh—like fruits and vegetables—such residues could sicken and kill.

By the 1920s, unwitting consumers began to fall ill, left shaking with fever, bloody urine, and “thready pulse” after eating asparagus, cabbage, celery, or the like. Some, like the Montana girl who ate three apples in a row, ended up dead. Journalists reported that people were “refusing to touch green commodities.” Doctors warned of a “menace to the public health.” By the time Froelicher stepped into his new role at Geigy, there was a frenzied search for a generation of insecticides that killed pests but not people.