In the book, you describe how factory workers at a plant making leaded gasoline literally started going crazy, then dying in the 1920s. We knew back then that lead exposure was dangerous, but it wasn’t banned until the 1970s.
Isn’t that an incredible story? They called it the “looney gas building” because people went in and went crazy. And not only did they have good evidence that it was poisonous and neurotoxic, they even got some rules on books in New York [to ban it]. And then the federal government, hand in hand with corporate America, just erased that progress.
Some researchers claim that lead-related brain damage accounted for much of the crime wave of the late 1970s and 1980s.
I was just starting to write a blog about why we need regulators like the FDA. Let’s look at the pre-regulatory days. [Leaded gasoline] is [particularly] scandalous because there’s so much government complicity.
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People don’t appreciate what the FDA does. Look at the elixir sulfanilimide disaster of 1937: a drug company used the chemical diethylene glycol to aid in sweetening [a children’s medication]. It did no testing even though was there was evidence that the chemical [normally used as an antifreeze] was poisonous.
There was an FDA, then, but it had no teeth. It didn’t require safety testing and the only reason the agency as able to start a recall was because [of misbranding]: an “elixir” was supposed to contain alcohol and this medication didn’t. But it wasn’t criminal [to sell this poisonous drug to parents]. A hundred people died, mostly children and the company had no liability at all.
In fact, a Chinese chemical company recently produced a drug with the same chemical and exported it to Panama, killing hundreds of children.
A lot of lives are saved by the FDA.
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You also write about how the government actually made bootleg alcohol more poisonous during Prohibition, in an attempt to deter drinking. Why haven’t we heard about that before?
All of it was in newspapers and magazines and speeches [of the time], but none of it was in the standard histories of Prohibition. I realized later that I found it because I was looking at it through the lens of poisoning.