Research Cited

Published by the Center for Media and Democracy and the Bioscience Resource Project, the Poison Papers lay out “a 40-year history of deceit and collusion involving the chemical industry and the regulatory agencies that were supposed to be protecting human health and the environment,” according to Peter von Stackelberg, a journalist who helped establish the online collection, as reported by Sharon Lerner on the news website “TheIntercept.com.”

The documents, which cover a range of topics including PCBs and herbicides, detail flaws with laboratory testing, efforts to conceal chemical science and the “extraordinary influence” of chemical manufacturers on regulators at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, according Lisa Graves at the Center for Media and Democracy, which funded the Poison Papers project.

“They show in many ways, that public health has not been protected,” Graves said of the documents. “We wanted to create a resource the public could use when trying to understand the failings or problems with the way the EPA might be captured by industry.”

According to Powelson’s 2014 disclosure, GEE Strategies, an energy and utilities consulting firm, funded his attendance at its Energy Leadership Forum in Falls Church, Virginia. Emails recently uncovered by UtilitySecrets, a joint watchdog project by the Energy & Policy Institute and Center for Media & Democracy, indicate that GEE Strategies has close ties to the Edison Electric Institute, which funded the firm’s Energy Leadership Forum meeting last year.

This “dump” adds to the compendium of documents not only from the March unsealing, but also, in the vast collection that has come to be called “The Poison Papers.” A project of The Bioscience Resource Project (BRP) and the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), The Poison Papers make publicly available more than 20,000 documents obtained through legal discovery in lawsuits against Dow, Monsanto, the EPA, the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Air Force, and pulp and paper companies, among others. These papers were amassed largely by author and activist Carol Van Strum, who kept them in her rural Oregon barn for decades. BRP and CMD describe their project: “The Poison Papers represent a vast trove of rediscovered chemical industry and regulatory agency documents and correspondence stretching back to the 1920s. Taken as a whole, the papers show that both industry and regulators understood the extraordinary toxicity of many chemical products and worked together to conceal this information from the public and the press.” In addition, the Poison Papers are just one part of the larger DocumentCloud, which contains over a million documents.

More than 20,000 internal memos, minuted meetings, letters and other documents have been published in the new archive, many for the first time.

Most were obtained from legal discovery and access to documents requests digitised by the Poison Papers Project, which was launched by the Bioscience Resource Project and the Center for Media and Democracy. Chiron Return contributed some documents to the library.