Poison Spring Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    Word of this fiasco reached the EPA when Manny Reyna, an IBT technician from Latin America, told Adrian Gross how the lab was cutting corners with its testing. The entire laboratory, one of the largest in the country, was a nightmare, Reyna said.
    In a corrupt place like IBT, nothing was sacred. Intimidated scientists and technicians did everything to make sure their studies found nothing that would raise questions with the government.
    Here’s what Gross learned: Technicians used the acronym TBDs for animals that were “too badly decomposed.” When animals escaped from their cages—and they did by the dozens nearly every day—IBT men hunted them down with “little spray bottles of chloroform.” IBT technicians cut tumors from the experimental animals and dumped their carcasses in the garbage. They disposed of all animals that showed any effects from the tested chemical. And if IBT researchers completed a two-year study in, say, fourteen months, they just invented all the data from the missing ten months. Meanwhile, IBT managers cut corners with lab workers; they did not train them well, and they did not pay them well. Most techs worked long hours in an unhealthy environment of brutality and alienation. 2
    IBT had been allowed to manage this swamp for twenty-four years without anybody on the outside, especially in government agencies, doing anything about it. It’s not that people didn’t know. On March 1, 1978, Edwin Johnson wrote a memo noting that “evidence is accumulating which suggests prior knowledge of those practices by the sponsor(s) of the [fraudulent spray] studies . . . I know that you share my deep concern regarding the seriousness of the regulatory ramifications of these recent findings of falsification of data upon which national and international regulatory decisions have been made.”
    Adrian Gross and his government colleagues finally confronted Gordon with the fake science Calandra was purchasing from him. Government lawyers wanted to indict him, but Gross argued successfully for giving him immunity so the full depth of the corruption at IBT could be exposed. Gordon managed to tell his story, but his experience at IBT ruined him. 3
    IBT lawyers discovered that Gordon had suffered a nervous breakdown, which made it necessary for him to be treated with hypnosis by a Northwestern University psychologist. The IBT lawyers tried, unsuccessfully, to discredit Gordon’s testimony and have the court declare a mistrial. Even Monsanto dumped its man at IBT the minute the trial in Chicago came to an end.
    “It was easy for me to smell the filth of IBT,” Gross explained to me. “Don’t forget, I was dealing with crooks who were too greedy, who were not satisfied to make a buck. And when you cheat, you are bound to make a simple error like recording all the fake numbers in neat columns at the same time with the same pencil.”
    Throughout the years that IBT was pulling off an enormous (and dangerous) fraud on the public, only one senior EPA official thought seriously of doing something about it: Richard D. Wilson, deputy assistant administrator for general enforcement. Wilson wanted to use the case of two nerve pesticides, acephate and orthene, made by the Chevron Chemical Company, to demonstrate what the government would do to companies that benefited from the crimes of IBT. The EPA had discovered that Chevron had submitted “inaccurate” testing data, Wilson wrote, and “the inaccuracies may have been the result of a deliberate falsification of the original test results by IBT.”
    Wilson told the EPA’s pesticide boss, Edwin Johnson, that he knew that IBT had faked the information and that Chevron had nonetheless used this data to convince the government that it would be safe for people to eat food contaminated with acephate. What was needed, Wilson wrote, was “strong legal action against those responsible.” 4
    For the government to retain any credibility, the EPA should have