The Poison Papers

Documenting the history of pesticide hazards in the United States

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Poison Papers (annotated version) released by UCSF

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The  Industry Documents library (IDL) of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), a digital archive of whistleblower and other internal documents from industry and regulators, has released an annotated and curated version of The Poison Papers.

A link to their press release.

PS this UCSF release does have some errors. In particular, Carol van Strum collected around 200,000 pages, which, by removing redundancies, irrelevancies, and unreadable material, the IDL has whittled to about 4,700 documents. Secondly, many of the documents are from regulators, mainly the EPA, and not just the chemical industry.

Sanjour Hazardous Waste Files Donated to the Industry Documents Library at UCSF

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William Sanjour is perhaps the EPA’s best-known whistleblower. He spent many of his nearly 30 years at the EPA as a Branch Chief exposing government corruption and assisting local and national efforts to combat incinerators, hazardous waste dumps, and other EPA and government abuses. He also testified before Congress many times. William Sanjour was featured in the documentaries The Killing Ground (ABC, 1979), In Our Water (1982) and The World According to Monsanto (2008). For our Independent Science News website he wrote two articles that encapsulate some of what he learned in his ‘career’ as a whistleblower (How the Once Tiny Waste Management Industry Captured EPA and Became VERY BIG and Designed to Fail: Why Regulatory Agencies Don’t Work).

We organised the collection and scanning and therefore the preservation of his personal work files (2,626 documents), which we have now donated to the UCSF Industry Documents Library. IDL curated and annotated these documents and they now hold these exceptional documents openly accessible for inspection and research and for perpetuity.

Roundup Trial: Monsanto Used Fake Data to Win Over Regulators

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Attorneys for a California couple who claim Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer gave them both cancer tried to convince an Oakland state court jury Thursday that the agrochemical company engaged in decades of fraud to hide the fact that the herbicide is carcinogenic…..See: https://www.courthousenews.com/roundup-trial-monsanto-used-fake-data-to-win-over-regulators/

Video: Biotechnology, Agrichemicals, and the Value of Life

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On a recent trip through Hawai’i as a guest of Hawai‘i Seed, Jonathan Latham, Director of the Project, talked at the University of Hawai’i.

Industrial agriculture is logically dependent on infringing on the quality of life, often catastrophically, of diverse creatures. The islands comprising Hawai’i exhibit those harms perhaps more than anywhere else on earth. Using new revelations of the Poison Papers (www.poisonpapers.org) as examples of how regulators fail to protect us I discuss the true extent of those toxic impacts. Even without revelations such as the Poison Papers however, we already know enough to stop supporting industrial agriculture, yet governments continue to do so, showering them with subsidies and other incentives. The reasons they decide wrongly are in part about economics and in part about scientific corruption; but here I point to an underlying conceptual flaw in our collective cultural understanding of life itself. Critiquing our standard, but illogical, modern interpretation of the nature of life is an overlooked key to understanding the the tragic and disastrous policies and practices prevailing in agriculture. But immediately obvious too is that the misunderstanding of life pervades much more broadly–into the justice system, into education, and into healthcare, to name just a few of those domains.