The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

dioxin: a polluter working with the pentagon 45provoked strong feelings and a good deal of anxiety. On April 15, 1970, thesecretary of agriculture announced on radio and television “the suspensionof the use of 2,4,5-T around lakes, ponds, recreation areas, and houses, andon crops intended for human consumption, because of the danger the herbicideposes to health.” 21This was the end of Agent Orange, but for American veterans it was thebeginning of a long battle for recognition of the harm they had suffered.Monsanto Organizes to Protect ItselfIn 1978, Paul Reutershan, a veteran suffering from intestinal cancer, suedthe manufacturers of Agent Orange. Thousands of veterans soon joined himin the first class action ever filed against Monsanto and its like. The followingyear, on January 10, 1979, a freight train carrying twenty thousandgallons of chlorophenol (a substance used in the manufacture of wood treatmentproducts) derailed in Sturgeon, Missouri, spilling the entire cargo. Itturned out that the shipment came from the Sauget factory where Monsantohad until recently been manufacturing its PCBs. Samples taken by theEPA found that the chemical product contained dioxin. Sixty-five residentsof Sturgeon, among them Frances Kemner, who was the lead plaintiff in theclass action Kemner v. Monsanto, sued Monsanto.This was a serious case for the company, especially since, following theSeveso catastrophe in 1976, TCDD was subject to particular scrutiny fromthe public and the media. Monsanto understood that it had to react if it didnot want to be involved in a multitude of trials in which the long-term effectsof dioxin on human health, particularly with respect to cancer, couldnot fail to come up. But it also knew that it had two assets, on which itwould constantly rely from the late 1970s on.In the first place, as Greenpeace, one of its fiercest opponents, pointedout in a report published in 1990, whatever its origin, dioxin is “a ubiquitouscontaminant in the U.S. population and environment.” 22 It is therefore difficultto prove that the level of dioxin recorded in an individual is directlytied to exposure as the result of an accident like the one in Sturgeon orspraying in Vietnam. To guard against possible accusations, Monsanto executivesstopped at nothing: with the complicity of employees at the St. Louismorgue, they secretly took tissue samples from the corpses of road accident