Published Tuesday, Nov 14th, in Independent Science News, the English translation of “Years Before Vietnam, the Chemical Industry Knew About Dioxins” was first published in German in BuzzFeed by Petra Sorge.
Synopsis: Decades before the herbicide 2,4,5-T was pulled from the US market for containing dioxins, the global chemical giants Dow, BASF, Monsanto, and others, had extensive discussions amongst themselves of whether to sell dioxin-contaminated chemicals. These discussions ranged from chemical analysis of each other’s products to comments on their safety and whether to inform governments that their products contained contaminants of “extraordinary danger”. The internal discussions reported in this article are now available to the public for the first time thanks to The Poison Papers Project.
“In any event, on 19 December 1964 Boehringer Ingelheim, in response to a request from Dow, described their experiences with dioxin.
Boehringer wrote: ‘Until now we have disclosed the content of this report to no one outside of our company, as we attach a special value thereto, because the extraordinary danger of tetrachlorobenzodioxin is not generally known’.”