Deceit and Denial by Markowitz Gerald

Author:Markowitz, Gerald
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520275829
Publisher: University of California Press

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE

Dr. Irving Selikoff and industry representatives alike recognized that the battle over vinyl chloride was not about the dangers and carcinogenic effects of one substance. Rather, it was what the prestigious business periodical Fortune called “the tip of an enormous regulatory iceberg.”103 Coming shortly after the formation of the EPA, NIOSH, OSHA, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the storm over vinyl chloride forced regulators, industry, consumer groups, and labor to confront “all the indirect costs of running a modern economy.”

Sheldon W. Samuels, the health director of the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO, argued that labor saw the battle as an attempt to put an end to industry's “free ride on social costs.” Fortune magazine, on the other hand, suggested that it was as important to prevent the death of an industry as it was to prevent workers’ deaths: “If government allows workers to be exposed to the gas, some of them may die. If it eliminates all exposure a valuable industry may disappear.”104 Vinyl chloride presented a situation where “medical and economic considerations collide[d] head-on.”105

Yet it was the language of science, rather than politics or economics, that dominated the debate about the causes of cancer, the means of prevention, and the responsibilities of the government. Consumers, labor, and public health advocates argued that there was no level at which exposure to carcinogens could be presumed effective in preventing cancers. “Advocates of the ‘no-detectable level’ argued for the so-called ‘one-hit’ theory of cancer causation,” wrote Paul Weaver in Fortune, describing the position that there was “no such thing as a risk-free exposure to a carcinogen.” The industry, on the other hand, argued that “cancers appear when the immune system breaks down.” A healthy immune system had to be weakened before a cancer could develop. Industry held that “what a carcinogen does is to weaken the immune system” and that the “weakening process requires a certain level of dose.” According to this interpretation, it was possible that there was “a risk-free level of exposure.”106

This debate over whether there were safe levels of exposure to vinyl chloride forced the new regulatory agencies to formulate the principles that would guide government's role in economic, scientific, and political decisions. The argument that played out over vinyl chloride is played out today over all toxic substances.

The vinyl chloride issue brought to the fore the question first raised during the tetraethyl lead controversy a half century before: Should industry be asked to prove that a substance was safe before introducing it into the environment, or should society be forced to prove it dangerous before banning it? Since the tetraethyl lead crisis, industry had largely prevailed in this debate, but vinyl chloride represented a whole new class of chemical products of enormous importance to the chemical industry and, perhaps, society.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal in October 1974, Barry Kramer described the stakes. If the labor and consumer advocates’ view prevailed, Kramer observed, “industry will no longer be able to assume blithely that untested chemicals .

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