The Poison Papers

Documenting the history of pesticide hazards in the United States

You are here: Home / Archives for Poison Papers News

Poison Papers News

Daylong UCSF Chemical Industry Documents Library Event Includes: “Failing for Forty Years: What the Poison Papers Tell Us About the EPA and How to Reform It”

Posted by on

September 13, 2018, the UCSF Environmental Health Initiative, in collaboration with the UCSF Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment and the UCSF Industry Documents Library, will host a day-long series on the science and stories contained within three new collections of chemical industry documents being added to the library. The goal is to expand public awareness about the contents of the collections and their vast potential in informing scientific research, public policy, and decision-making.

Lecture:

“Failing for Forty Years: What the Poison Papers Tell Us About the EPA and How to Reform It”

Thursday September 13 from 10:00am-11:00am
Location:
Byers Auditorium
UCSF Mission Bay Campus
600 16th Street
San Francisco, CA 94143
United States

Jonathan Latham, Director of the Bioscience Resource Project and donor of the Poison Papers to the UCSF Chemical Industry Documents library. Dr. Latham will talk about the importance of the 20,000-document collection and how they expose problems with both the internal culture of the EPA and its legal framework that are often fraught with industry influences that prevent precautionary decision-making, even when the science clearly points to danger.

Brunch to follow in Genentech Hall Atrium from 11-12.


*************

Panel Discussion:

“Unsealing the Science: What the Public can Learn from Internal Chemical Industry Documents,”

– 533 Parnassus Avenue
Cole Hall Auditorium
San Francisco, CA 94143
United States

A panel discussion with the donors of three new UCSF chemical industry documents collections – the Glyphosate and Agrochemical Collection (Gary Ruskin, US Right to Know), the Poison Papers (Jonathan Latham, Bioscience Resource Project), and the Benzene Collection (Raphael Metzger, principal of the Metzger Law Group) will explore what the documents mean for public health and the perils they faced in making these documents public.  Professor Stanton Glantz, who began the library with the first collection of internal tobacco industry documents, will introduce the panel and explain how the documents have been used to inform litigation, documentaries, and public policy decisions. The panel will be moderated by Dr. Tracey Woodruff, Professor and Director of the UCSF Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment and Co-Director of the UCSF Environmental Health Initiative, which has supported the development of the Chemical Industry Documents library.

Panel discussion from 3:30-5:30 at Cole Hall Auditorium.

To attend, please click here to reserve your free ticket.

“Poison Papers” and Major Monsanto Document Release Exposes Toxicity and Collusion

Posted by on

Published in The Maui Independent on August 2, 2017 by Jon Wood house and Jonathan Greenberg

Historic Disclosures Prove That Safety of FDA and EPA-Approved Chemicals Were Based on Tobacco Industry-like Collusion Promoting Demonstrably Faked Science.

More than 100,000 pages of documents exposing how the chemical industry and government regulators knew about the extraordinary toxicity of many chemical products, yet worked together to conceal this information from the public and the press, were made publicly available last week through a remarkable project called the Poison Papers.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  explained, “Monsanto has been spinning its lethal yarn to everybody for years and suborning various perjuries from regulators and scientists who have all been lying in concert to American farmers, landscapers and consumers. These new revelations are commiserate with the documents that brought down big tobacco.”

Read the full article at: https://mauiindependent.org/poison-papers-major-monsanto-document-release-exposes-toxicity-collusion/

In-Depth Interview: Dr. Jonathan Latham Exposes the Game EPA Plays with Industries it Regulates

Posted by on

Based on the newly-released Poison Papers, Dr. Jonathan Latham of Independent Science News slams the EPA and its predecessors. Latham is also executive director of the Bioscience Resource Project, which has released a huge trove of documents from industries and regulators, the Poison Papers.  Visit Independent Science News here.

We open with a discussion of recent moves by Trump’s EPA under Scott Pruitt, which just announced very narrow enforcement of 2016’s updates of the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976.  Latham is dismissive, saying the EPA “already had its agenda for not doing anything”, and that EPA “has never done its job”.

This leads to his description of the Poison Papers, which date to 1920 and show that pattern of weak regulation, unchanged by the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.  We walk through searches for “Agent Orange” and “glyphosate”, and he comments on the range of documents in the collection.

Latham offers a sweeping indictment of EPA and regulation of toxic chemicals in general, describing a game where the industries are always outraged at “over-reach” and EPA enables the industries while appearing to regulate them.  He sees little difference between Democrats who champion science as the basis of regulation and Republicans who promote corporate profits over sensible regulation.

In-Depth Interview: Dr. Jonathan Latham Exposes the Game EPA Plays with Industries it Regulates