Research Cited

The EPA is known to hold strong ties to oil, gas, and chemical corporations, enforcing extremely lenient regulations that allow these companies to profit at the expense of our health and the environment. The Bioscience Resource Project and The Center for Media and Democracy recently teamed up to expose some of this corruption by publishing the Poison Papers, which contains thousands upon thousands of EPA, government, and chemical company documents.

A project of the Center for Media and Democracy and the Bioscience Resource Project, the files now run to some 200,000 pages, having just doubled in size with the contributions of a 76-year-old activist whose long struggle with pesticide manufacturers and regulators is Lerner’s subject.

A collection of long archived documents dating back to the 1920s were released last week showcasing the efforts of the chemical industry and the federal government to conceal from the public the real dangers associated with the use and manufacture of chemical products. The Bioscience Resource Project and the Center for Media and Democracy released more than 200,000 pages of these documents now accessible on the “Poison Papers” website.

Thousands of pages of documents compiled from lawsuits against Dow, Monsanto, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Forest Service, and the Air Force are now in the public domain. Through the work of a project called the Poison Papers, under the Center for Media and Democracy, the collection is online and, according to the people who published them, they reveal years of apparent collusion between chemical companies and regulatory agencies.

This week, the Center for Media and Democracy released a cache of chemical industry documents that, the research and advocacy group argues, “lays 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.” Dow and Monsanto are among the companies the report focuses on. The trove of 100,000 document can be viewed here, but for a thorough summary of them read Sharon Lerner’s rundown in The Intercept.

This transcript is part of more than 20,000 documents, weighing over three tons, just released by the Bioscience Resource Project and the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), on the “Poison Papers.” website.

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The Poison Papers represent a vast trove of rediscovered chemical industry and regulatory agency documents and correspondence stretching back to the 1920s. Collectively they shed light on what was known about chemical toxicity, when, and by whom, in the often-incriminating words of the participants themselves.

This transcript is part of more than 20,000 documents, weighing over three tons, just released by the Bioscience Resource Project and the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), on the “Poison Papers.” website.

…

The Poison Papers represent a vast trove of rediscovered chemical industry and regulatory agency documents and correspondence stretching back to the 1920s. Collectively they shed light on what was known about chemical toxicity, when, and by whom, in the often-incriminating words of the participants themselves.