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C H A P T ER 14 The End of Trail Dust The herbicide industry was given a tremendous boost by World War II, but may have been mortally wounded by the war in Vietnam. —Donald Davis, Auburn University1 The DuBridge announcement energized a loose union of local citizens’ groups and antiwar activists, the beginning of a new environmental movement. Now that their suspicions had been confirmed by the Bionetics report, they pushed to end both the military and domestic uses of D and T. On December 27, 1969, the AAAS adopted a resolution expressing concern about the teratogenic properties of Agent Orange. It selected Matthew Meselson (who had helped get the Bionetics report released) to form an Herbicide Assessment Committee (HAC).2 In the spring of 1970, the HAC asked the manufacturers for samples of Orange. Diamond claimed that it had nothing available, but assured the committee that its Orange had always contained less than 1 ppm TCDD.3 Hercules stalled until November, and then asked the Defense Department for permission not to cooperate. But “there was no manner in which DoD should or would object to giving samples to the AAAS group. I guess this puts the monkey on our back.”4 HAC members visited Vietnam in the summer of 1970, but because the war was still going on, they could only inspect sprayed sites from the air. The Defense Department refused to give them the coordinates of previous spray missions, claiming it would compromise target locations. Paul Cecil, a former Ranch Hander who didn’t approve of the HAC, called this decision “ill-considered.” “The government’s argument was valid only if it was assumed that enemy forces in the sprayed areas did not know where they were.”5 In early 1970, the military sponsored its own research on the effects of Trail Dust. One study analyzed Orange’s behavior after entering Vietnam’s environment ; the other was an epidemiological study on birth defects in Vietnam. There were scarcely any hospital records, so the researchers relied largely on “word of mouth.” An Army officer told a Dow representative, “Rumors have been circulated 120 in respect to alleged teratogenic effects of herbicides that would tax the imagination of a good fiction writer.”6 In March 1970, a new military herbicide committee argued that the Bionetics findings didn’t necessarily apply to Vietnam because they involved T acid, not the butyl esters used in Orange. “2,4,5-T acid is not used as an herbicide. The teratology of Orange has not been evaluated. It is not possible to detect the dioxin content in Orange due to the interference of 2,4-D, but study is continuing.”7 This argument only made sense if the butyl alcohol added to T acid was somehow responsible for the birth defects. The military’s new science didn’t have much of an impact. On March 23, a Dow representative met with the Army’s chief chemical officer in Vietnam, who “expressed a personal opinion that by September 1970, the entire program will be reduced to applications by ground equipment and by helicopter only” (emphasis in original).8 The military’s herbicide committee didn’t seem to notice. It was even devising new technology : improved spray hoses and an “anti-crop tank.”9 Charles Minarik and his team seemed to have lost their influence. One Dow sales executive reported that his contacts in Vietnam “were not in a position to name the organization conducting the new environmental investigation in Vietnam, but it was not Ft. Detrick” (emphasis in original).10 A few days after the DuBridge announcement, the National Agricultural Chemicals Association, the industry’s trade group, established a 2,4,5-T task force to coordinate the manufacturers’ lobbying and PR efforts.11 In late November, V. K. Rowe and Julius Johnson, Dow’s vice president for research, visited Diane Courtney, who was now at the NIEHS. They asked her where she’d gotten her T sample and suggested that it might have been contaminated by dioxin.12 Courtney told them that the sample came from Diamond and gave them a bit of it to analyze. It contained about 30 ppm TCDD. Dow notified all the relevant government agencies that the Bionetics sample was highly contaminated and that the birth defects had probably been caused by dioxin, not by T.13 Dow also announced that it would conduct a new teratology study, using its own, cleaner herbicide. In April 1970, the Senate...

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