Dad’s insecticides and Proposition 105

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Editors note: Paul Danish’s views are his own and do not represent the views of Boulder Weekly, which is endorsing a yes vote on Proposition 105. Paul Danish would like to state that the Boulder Weekly’s views are its own and do not represent the views of Paul Danish.

You don’t hear much about Chlordane, Heptachlor, Aldrin and Dieldrin anymore, and that is as it should be.

Chlordane, Heptachlor, Aldrin and Dieldrin are four of the nastiest insecticides ever produced. All four have been linked to a variety of cancers and other diseases, and all four have either been banned outright or severely restricted in their use by most countries for at least 20 years.

I always thought of them as my dad’s insecticides.

My parents moved to Denver in 1947, when I was four. Al Danish, my father, had landed a job with Julius Hyman and Co., a start-up insecticide company that located its labs and production facilities at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal.

The company was founded by Julius Hyman, a chemist who had run the research lab for Velsicol, a Chicago chemical company he had co-founded with a businessman named Joseph Regenstein in 1931.

At Velsicol, Hyman and the chemists under him discovered and patented ways of producing a new class of insecticides called organochlorides, of which Chlordane, Heptachlor, Aldrin and Dieldrin are examples.

Hyman and Regenstein eventually had a falling out over patent rights, and in 1946 Hyman resigned and invited the Velsicol chemists and lab techs to join him in starting a new company, whose purpose was to commercialize the new insecticides. About two dozen of them did — including Al Danish.

Al was a research and analytical chemist. His responsibilities at Hyman and Company included research to determine how much of the insecticides or their residues accumulated in crops or remained in the soil and for how long. He also was involved in writing the applications to the Food and Drug Administration for their approval.

Hyman’s insecticides were approved for use in 1948, and they were wildly successful all over the world.

Al told me that the Iranian government used one of them — Aldrin, if memory serves — to combat a locust plague that was devastating the country’s crops and threatening to cause mass starvation. The insecticide stopped the plague in its tracks. When company reps inspected some of the fields that had been sprayed they found them blanketed with dead locusts to a depth of several inches.

I asked him how many people would have died if the plague hadn’t been stopped. Maybe 200,000, he said.

In those days the best tests for insecticide residues in soils couldn’t detect concentrations below 0.1 part per million. As a result, the FDA had set 0.1 ppm as the safe allowed limit for Aldrin and Dieldrin in soil.

It wasn’t until later, when much more sensitive tests for the presence of residues in soils and food were developed, that the link between organochloride insecticides and cancer and other chronic diseases emerged. But it was known from the get-go that the insecticides were dangerous if mishandled.

How dangerous? Al told me that one day a company lab tech spilled a quart of concentrated Aldrin on herself. Al told her to take a shower and change her clothes. She didn’t. Four hours later she was dead.

In 1951 Hyman sold the company to Shell Oil. About the time the company was changing hands, a new and more sensitive test for insecticide residues was developed — and it became clear that detectable residues accumulated in food and remained in the soil for years after spraying.

Al wrote a report to Shell management warning them of the new findings and recommending some steps that could be taken to minimize the risks. Not long after he submitted it, he was fired.

The report made it abundantly clear that the four insecticides were fraught with both known and unknown risks, and strongly urged Shell to investigate them aggressively, report them candidly, and start a robust program of harm reduction.

As a result of all this, I grew up learning the dangers of pesticides and developing a decent respect for those dangers. And for the benefits — like preventing mass starvation.

So when Monsanto introduced genetically modified crops that contained a gene from the Bacillus thuringiensis bacteria that produces a protein that is deadly to a number of insect pests but is harmless to people, I considered it an unalloyed good.

And then, to my utter amazement, environmentalists and so-called peace and justice activists launched a sweeping attack on GMO crops, claiming they were a danger to human health and the environment.

The claims are without scientific merit. Despite more than a decade of trying, anti-GMO activists have yet to produce any victims (even though more than 90 percent of the corn, cotton, soybeans and sugar beets grown in the U.S. are GMO varieties), and the impact of genetically modified crops on the environment is orders of magnitude less than the impact of the insecticides they replaced.

The reason I’m bringing all this up is that Coloradans are currently voting on an initiative — Proposition 105 — to require foods containing GMOs to be labeled as such.

Sponsors of the initiative argue they are just fighting for the people’s right to know what they’re getting. Maybe so, but about a month ago one anti-GMO activist with a national organization let slip another agenda. If foods containing GMOs are labeled, he said, we can organize against them.

There is no nice way to say this. Proposition 105 is intellectually dishonest, politically and morally evil, and if it results in a resurrection of conventional pesticide use, a threat to public health, the environment and the food supply. A “no” vote is an unqualified good.

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This opinion column does not necessarily reflect the views of Boulder Weekly.