=======================Electronic Edition========================
RACHEL’S HAZARDOUS WASTE NEWS #195
—August 22, 1990—
News and resources for environmental justice.
——
Environmental Research Foundation
P.O. Box 5036, Annapolis, MD 21403
Fax (410) 263-8944; Internet: erf@igc.apc.org
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RISK ASSESSMENT–PART 2: NO
PERSON SHALL BE… DEPRIVED OF LIFE….
The 5th amendment to the Constitution of the United States says,
“No person shall be… deprived of life, liberty or property
without due process of law.” Before the state can execute you,
you are supposed to have your day in court, to be judged for your
crimes (if any) by a jury of your peers. An execution without due
process is a murder.
Despite these important protections in our Constitution, murder
of innocent Americans is slowly but surely becoming acceptable
because of the increasing use of a technique called “risk
assessment.”
As we saw last week, risk assessment had its origins in the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) 1954 decision to abandon the
fight to keep pesticidal poisons out of the American food supply.
Instead, FDA decided in 1954 to allow (and thus legitimize)
certain amounts of poisons in our food. Initially these amounts
were called “safe” but as knowledge grew, scientists came to
realize that, at least in the case of cancer-causing poisons,
someone, somewhere would be harmed if any amount appeared in the
nation’s food supply. After that realization, “acceptable”
amounts were set on the basis of predictions of how many people
would be killed. Usually the official goal was to kill no more
than one-in-a-million people, though sometimes
onein-a-hundred-thousand is deemed acceptable. This technique is
now called “risk assessment,” and today it is so widely practiced
that some people consider it the only possible way to think about
such matters, which of course isn’t true. (Another time we’ll
discuss alternatives to risk assessment.) Now there are
individuals (indeed, whole companies) who do nothing but write
“risk assessments” for money; sometimes they work for polluters,
sometimes they work for governments, but always they are helping
establish how many people will (and, by implication, should) die.
Our government now routinely issues licenses (called permits)
that allow people to kill other people by putting poisons into
our common air and water supplies, and these licenses are based
on risk assessments.
As we noted above, the number one-in-a-million is typically
called a “negligible risk” or an “acceptable risk.” If you want
some dangerous project to be licensed, you hire someone to write
a risk assessment “proving” that the risks to the public from
your project will not exceed one-in-a-million. This means that
the person writing the risk assessment is reasonably sure that
your project will actually kill no more than one person out of
every million persons affected by the project. (There’s a lot of
guesswork in such estimates.)
An important point to recognize is that risk assessment does not
predict individual risk; risks are not equally distributed. So if
a million people live within range of, say, an incinerator smoke
stack spewing carcinogens, the one-in-a-million risk will not be
evenly distributed among the affected population. Because of wind
patterns, topography, location of residences, individual
susceptibility, and other individual health conditions, some
people are much more likely to be killed than others.
But let’s get specific. The National Academy of Sciences
calculates that pesticides are responsible for 2.1% of all U.S.
cancer deaths each year; there were 461,520 cancer deaths in the
U.S. in 1985; 2.1% of this is 9692 deaths. So government
decisions to license pesticides over the last few decades have
killed roughly 10,000 Americans each year, according to official
estimates. Since there are 245 million Americans, we can
calculate that pesticides kill (by giving cancer to) 40 out of
every million citizens each year. (You see, the one-in-a-million
decisions accumulate as each new one-in-a-million risk is added
to the environment. A typical risk assessment does not consider
these cumulative impacts of many individual decisions.)
Why do we let our government issue licenses to kill 10,000
citizens each year? We let it happen because the victims die
anonymously. They are faceless. We don’t know exactly who they
are.
But what if the names and addresses of the victims were known? If
the names of the victims were known, no one would dispute that
this is murder. And, “Why should it matter that contemporary
‘negligible risk’ victims are known only in number and not by
name? We do not excuse the killer who shoots into a large crowd
of strangers because he doesn’t know his victims’ names and he
kills only a few people or even just one. Why, then, do we
tolerate those who spray the crowd with poisons rather than
bullets? Is it not still murder? The corpses lie just as dead.”
We are quoting Paul Merrell and Carol Van Strum (see our last
paragraph, below.)
We allow our regulatory officials to get away with killing large
numbers of us because we accept their rhetoric in which they
claim not to kill us, but only to impose “risks” on us. And
because we accept many risks each day (such as driving our car),
they argue we should accept new, chemical risks without
complaint. If we accept the substantial risk of driving an
automobile, how can we logically object to a tiny
(one-in-a-million) added risk from chemical contamination of our
food or water?
“A better question is, why should we be so naive? These offenders
do not impose ‘risks’ upon a crowd; they deliberately execute
individual human beings in the name of profit,” Merrell and Van
Strum argue. They actually kill real people by their decisions,
not merely impose abstract “risk.” And it is important to note
that the informed consent of the victims is not obtained.
A few years ago, nationwide fear and outrage erupted when a small
number of people died after a few Tylenol bottles were spiked
with cyanide.
Courts have declared that it is murder for a wife to kill her
husband by lacing his chili with parathion (a pesticide), so how
can we excuse those who authorize the poisoning of the entire
nation’s food supply? Is it sufficient justification for murder
that only a few will die? If so, how can we justify punishing the
Tylenol killer or the wife who murders only one husband?
We need to recognize risk assessment (for pesticides and other
hazardous chemicals) for what it is: evidence of premeditated
murder. It documents the intent of regulators and polluters to
sacrifice individual lives on the altar of profit. The person who
writes the risk assessment is an accessory to a felony. The
concept of ‘negligible risk’ is tolerated only because of the
anonymity of its intended victims. If our science improved and we
could publish the names and addresses of intended victims in the
newspaper, risk assessment would immediately be recognized as
murder and would cease, you can be sure.
Without dead bodies, it may be impossible to prosecute
decision-makers and those who conduct risk assessments, but it
still may be possible to prosecute them for conspiracy to commit
murder, and for attempted murder, both of which are felonies.
Such prosecutions will succeed when this ‘negligible’ form of
murder ceases to be acceptable to prosecutors and to the public.
In the meantime, citizens can speak out, reject risk assessment,
and call it what it is: premeditated murder of innocent citizens.
Most of the material for this week’s newsletter was taken from
Paul Merrell and Carol Van Strum, “Negligible Risk or
Premeditated Murder?” JOURNAL OF PESTICIDE REFORM Vol. 10
(Spring, 1990), pgs. 20-22. For years, Carol and Paul have been
leading, and supporting, the fight to restrict the use of
herbicides and other poisons in the northwestern U.S. Their most
recent book is THE POLITICS OF PENTA (Seattle, WA: Greenpeace
Penta Campaign [4649 Sunnyside Avenue North, Seattle, WA 98103;
(206) 632-4326; 148 pgs., $10], about the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency’s failure to regulate pentachlorophenol–and
about the hopelessness of “regulation” as a solution to toxics
problems; prevention is the only way. They offer many important
publications on pesticides and dioxins through Alder-Hill
Associates, 7493 East Five Rivers Road, Tidewater, OR 97390;
(503) 528-7151. You will also want to subscribe to the thoughtful
and informative quarterly JOURNAL OF PESTICIDE REFORM, P.O. Box
1393, Eugene, OR 97440; $15 for 4 issues and well worth it. Hats
off to Mary O’Brien who has just ended an outstanding six-year
tenure as editor of JPR.
–Peter Montague, Ph.D.
Descriptor terms: risk assessment; pesticides; carol van strum;
paul merrell; mary o’brien; fda; mortality; health statistics;
cancers;