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How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT
The story of an infamous poison that left toxic bodies and decimated wildlife in its wake is also a cautionary tale about how corporations stoke the flames of science denialism for profit.
The chemical compound DDT first earned fame during World War II by wiping out insects that caused disease and boosting Allied forces to victory. Americans granted it a hero’s homecoming, spraying it on everything from crops and livestock to cupboards and curtains. Then, in 1972, it was banned in the US. But decades after that, a cry arose to demand its return.
This is the sweeping narrative of generations of Americans who struggled to make sense of the notorious chemical’s risks and benefits. Historian Elena Conis follows DDT from postwar farms, factories, and suburban enclaves to the floors of Congress and tony social clubs, where industry barons met with Madison Avenue brain trusts to figure out how to sell the idea that a little poison in our food and bodies was nothing to worry about.
In an age of spreading misinformation on issues including pesticides, vaccines, and climate change, Conis shows that we need new ways of communicating about science—as a constantly evolving discipline, not an immutable collection of facts—before it’s too late.
The chemical compound DDT first earned fame during World War II by wiping out insects that caused disease and boosting Allied forces to victory. Americans granted it a hero’s homecoming, spraying it on everything from crops and livestock to cupboards and curtains. Then, in 1972, it was banned in the US. But decades after that, a cry arose to demand its return.
This is the sweeping narrative of generations of Americans who struggled to make sense of the notorious chemical’s risks and benefits. Historian Elena Conis follows DDT from postwar farms, factories, and suburban enclaves to the floors of Congress and tony social clubs, where industry barons met with Madison Avenue brain trusts to figure out how to sell the idea that a little poison in our food and bodies was nothing to worry about.
In an age of spreading misinformation on issues including pesticides, vaccines, and climate change, Conis shows that we need new ways of communicating about science—as a constantly evolving discipline, not an immutable collection of facts—before it’s too late.
388 pages, Hardcover
First published April 12, 2022
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2094 people want to read
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March 27, 2022
The story of DDT is a rollercoaster ride of scientists, damaged people and the environment, fighting to get rid of this dangerous insecticide, while corporations campaign with every trick in the Big Tobacco book to bring it back. The lies, the fraud, the misinformation and the disinformation will be very familiar to any reader who has been the least bit awake the past five years.
Elena Conis, a historian of medicine, tells the whole frustrating story in How to Sell a Poison. Her book is an easy reading, fast paced collection of less than delightful stories, a biography of an ongoing disaster that needs remembering and examination. If Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was a closeup and exposé of a bad situation, this book tacks on a further 60 years' worth of dishonesty and manipulation in the neverending struggle for profit over people and ecology.
In a nutshell, Big Tobacco heavily funded think tanks, non profits and journalists to make it seem as though the science was wrong, and to dictate that DDT was safe for humans. That it magically only hurt insects, and even then, selectively. That people could spray it on the walls inside their homes to kill mosquitoes. That anyone could eat, yes eat it, like candy, and that it would save millions of lives every year.
Why would they say these things? Simply to demonstrate that authorities could not be trusted to make public health policy, and that tobacco products should not be regulated by institutions that got it all wrong, all the time. Also, tobacco itself comes loaded with DDT. The whole world is paying the price for their efforts.
It is a story of unsung heroes, mostly women, it seems, who suffered the effects, did the research, brought experts together, wrote up the stories and pushed for legislation to outlaw DDT before it did any more damage. They raised awareness, got scientists and labs to undertake studies, and sued at the slightest opportunity. Even when they lost, they felt they won by raising awareness nationally.
For a while, it worked. But the money pump kept up the pressure from the other side, eventually getting DDT off the blacklist of chemical compounds too dangerous to use.
For a few decades through the middle of the last century, the USA was under the rule of the Delaney Clause, which stipulated that if any additive could be shown to cause cancer in lab animals, it must be banned from human consumption. While it sounded great, the truth is anything pumped into rats in truly and profoundly excessive amounts will cause cancer. For example, when the FDA banned the new sugar substitute cyclamates in the early 70s, it cited a study where if raised to human-sized quantities, would require adults to drink 1200 sugar-free drinks a day for ten years to achieve the same effect. In other words, they pump those rats with absurdly high quantities of chemicals. Had they done it with salt or sugar, those would have to have been banned as well. I remember when they banned nitrites in bacon. A similarly absurd amount would be required to achieve the goal of cancer in humans. The reporter on ABC News said that of course this could never happen, because no one could afford it (the country was experiencing huge price increases in meats). It all became that silly. So Delany had to go.
Delany was symptomatic of the general state of ignorance over chemicals and their unintended side effects. The government operated under no standards in the first two thirds of the century. Laws were generally absent. Lawmakers were in the pockets of corporations. Scientists had no consistent process for measuring them or their effects. Anyone could develop a chemical compound and distribute it to the world without testing, licensing or approval. 88,000 of them were released; only about 125 were ever tested. Today, it's more like 125,000 chemical compounds and the planet is staggering under the burden.
So with DDT. It was put out there as a miracle chemical from World War II, capable of killing bad insects like mosquitoes without killing good ones like bees. Of course, no one could explain why, because no testing was done to prove it. So whole fields of crops were dusted with DDT powder from airplanes, including right over the farmworkers picking the strawberries and grapes below. People were sickened, weakened and dying all over the world, while DDT makers increased production dramatically to cover the planet with their miracle. It was cheap to make, cheap to buy, and legendary in its killing powers.
The most forceful lie was that DDT would wipe out malaria, saving millions of lives. Therefore, anything government did to curtail DDT was equivalent to murdering people. It was touted as the way to eradicate polio too. This was all false. Plus, various insects could easily be shown to evolve immunity to DDT. Malaria has not looked back either. If malaria hasn't been wiped out by 80 years of DDT application, it's not going to be - ever.
But what DDT did do was accumulate in body fat, and thrive there. Fish, when tested at all, would show up with huge multiples of the amount of DDT considered safe. So did people. Birds developed neurological conditions causing them to tremble uncontrollably, lose their balance, and die. Their eggs became so frail they would break just from a parent incubating them. Birds of prey, from eagles to falcons, were almost totally wiped out from this one factor alone. They got DDT from eating fish and other birds saturated with DDT.
When science finally caught up to how to investigate things like chemical pesticides, it was discovered that the same bioaccumulation was at work in humans. Younger women accumulated far more of it than older women, who might show no ill effects at all. Breast cancer was a typical (if unproven) result. But the really bad victims, it turned out, were the newborns of the younger women. Starting off in the fetus allowed DDT to do major damage to future generations. "In general their children had more symptoms of allergies, including wheezing and rashes, and more frequent fevers than the children of women with lower levels of DDT," Conis says.
DDT is at bottom, a neurotoxin. And everyone everywhere now has DDT in their bodies. There is no getting away from it on this planet. From Antarctic penguins to American billionaires in their spaceships, DDT is now part of every living being. Big business has seen to that.
Males of every species were not spared either. DDT mimics estrogen. Males could develop minuscule reproductive organs, and sprout female nipples, or malfunctioning organs of both sexes. All through the animal kingdom, males have been incapable of mating, while both sexes have been dropping dead from the effects of DDT. Boys and girls have early onset of puberty from DDT, and women suffer miscarriages and thyroid conditions. And sadly, endocrine disruptors were so new at the time, it was far too easy not just to deny DDT as their cause, but to deny they existed at all.
There is an American Conservative meme that played a major role in the rise and resurrection of DDT. I call it Are you okay now. It is extreme short-term thinking that dictates no action be taken if everything seems fine at the moment. And as most people did not die immediately from the effects of DDT, therefore it was perfectly safe to use in homes, in and on people, and basically everywhere over the Earth. We saw this again when the COVID pandemic began. The US president himself claimed there were only 50 people who had it, so there was no point in mobilizing anyone or anything to deal with it. No action was taken until the bodies began piling up. If you didn't have COVID, there was nothing to worry about.
But there was plenty of backlash over DDT. Who caught the the direct fire of it was Rachel Carson, who had died decades earlier. She was vilified in the media and in Congress, called a paranoid liar and a mass murderer who killed more people than Hitler. All because she (correctly) predicted the effects of DDT. And wasn't around to defend herself.
The DDT ban was labeled ecoimperialism. Big Tobacco hired all the "professional science deniers" it could find, a tactic very much in evidence today over climate change. It helped Roger Bate create a global science-denying enterprise. This British curmudgeon had been denying the value of science for decades, and built an empire of global misinformation thanks to tobacco dollars. Philip Morris alone paid him ten thousand pounds sterling a month. America had its Elizabeth Whelan, accepted as a qualified pundit everywhere, in every medium. She was also expert at gathering dollars from a who's who of Fortune 500 firms. Conis says "they funded Bate, whose ESEF (European Science and Environment Forum) had previously denied the harms of secondhand smoke, endocrine disruption, and global warming. Now Bate authored a document titled 'International Public Health Strategy,' which wove its way through tobacco executives’ inboxes as the POPs (Persistent Organic Pollutants) convention brought DDT back into the public eye."
So DDT is back. It has been dropped from several international agreements limiting chemical poisons. Farmers demand it. It is safe and effective. There is no proof it has ever killed anyone. It helps produce abundant safe food, and is clearing the world of malaria. And if you believe all that, I have a bridge I'd like to offer you, connecting Brooklyn to Manhattan.
Conis says “'Like McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and Levi’s jeans,' wrote journalist Paul Thacker, at this point 'scientific disinformation is an iconic American product.'”
For Conis "It’s an illustration: of forces unseen, of values unacknowledged, and of the endless game of catch-up we play when we pollute first, regulate later; deploy first, study later; and act first, reflect later."
David Wineberg
If you liked this review, I invite you to read more in my book The Straight Dope. It’s an essay collection based on my first thousand reviews and what I learned. Right now it’s FREE for Prime members, otherwise — cheap! Reputed to be fascinating and a superfast read. And you already know it is well-written. https://www.amazon.com/Straight-Dope-...
Elena Conis, a historian of medicine, tells the whole frustrating story in How to Sell a Poison. Her book is an easy reading, fast paced collection of less than delightful stories, a biography of an ongoing disaster that needs remembering and examination. If Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was a closeup and exposé of a bad situation, this book tacks on a further 60 years' worth of dishonesty and manipulation in the neverending struggle for profit over people and ecology.
In a nutshell, Big Tobacco heavily funded think tanks, non profits and journalists to make it seem as though the science was wrong, and to dictate that DDT was safe for humans. That it magically only hurt insects, and even then, selectively. That people could spray it on the walls inside their homes to kill mosquitoes. That anyone could eat, yes eat it, like candy, and that it would save millions of lives every year.
Why would they say these things? Simply to demonstrate that authorities could not be trusted to make public health policy, and that tobacco products should not be regulated by institutions that got it all wrong, all the time. Also, tobacco itself comes loaded with DDT. The whole world is paying the price for their efforts.
It is a story of unsung heroes, mostly women, it seems, who suffered the effects, did the research, brought experts together, wrote up the stories and pushed for legislation to outlaw DDT before it did any more damage. They raised awareness, got scientists and labs to undertake studies, and sued at the slightest opportunity. Even when they lost, they felt they won by raising awareness nationally.
For a while, it worked. But the money pump kept up the pressure from the other side, eventually getting DDT off the blacklist of chemical compounds too dangerous to use.
For a few decades through the middle of the last century, the USA was under the rule of the Delaney Clause, which stipulated that if any additive could be shown to cause cancer in lab animals, it must be banned from human consumption. While it sounded great, the truth is anything pumped into rats in truly and profoundly excessive amounts will cause cancer. For example, when the FDA banned the new sugar substitute cyclamates in the early 70s, it cited a study where if raised to human-sized quantities, would require adults to drink 1200 sugar-free drinks a day for ten years to achieve the same effect. In other words, they pump those rats with absurdly high quantities of chemicals. Had they done it with salt or sugar, those would have to have been banned as well. I remember when they banned nitrites in bacon. A similarly absurd amount would be required to achieve the goal of cancer in humans. The reporter on ABC News said that of course this could never happen, because no one could afford it (the country was experiencing huge price increases in meats). It all became that silly. So Delany had to go.
Delany was symptomatic of the general state of ignorance over chemicals and their unintended side effects. The government operated under no standards in the first two thirds of the century. Laws were generally absent. Lawmakers were in the pockets of corporations. Scientists had no consistent process for measuring them or their effects. Anyone could develop a chemical compound and distribute it to the world without testing, licensing or approval. 88,000 of them were released; only about 125 were ever tested. Today, it's more like 125,000 chemical compounds and the planet is staggering under the burden.
So with DDT. It was put out there as a miracle chemical from World War II, capable of killing bad insects like mosquitoes without killing good ones like bees. Of course, no one could explain why, because no testing was done to prove it. So whole fields of crops were dusted with DDT powder from airplanes, including right over the farmworkers picking the strawberries and grapes below. People were sickened, weakened and dying all over the world, while DDT makers increased production dramatically to cover the planet with their miracle. It was cheap to make, cheap to buy, and legendary in its killing powers.
The most forceful lie was that DDT would wipe out malaria, saving millions of lives. Therefore, anything government did to curtail DDT was equivalent to murdering people. It was touted as the way to eradicate polio too. This was all false. Plus, various insects could easily be shown to evolve immunity to DDT. Malaria has not looked back either. If malaria hasn't been wiped out by 80 years of DDT application, it's not going to be - ever.
But what DDT did do was accumulate in body fat, and thrive there. Fish, when tested at all, would show up with huge multiples of the amount of DDT considered safe. So did people. Birds developed neurological conditions causing them to tremble uncontrollably, lose their balance, and die. Their eggs became so frail they would break just from a parent incubating them. Birds of prey, from eagles to falcons, were almost totally wiped out from this one factor alone. They got DDT from eating fish and other birds saturated with DDT.
When science finally caught up to how to investigate things like chemical pesticides, it was discovered that the same bioaccumulation was at work in humans. Younger women accumulated far more of it than older women, who might show no ill effects at all. Breast cancer was a typical (if unproven) result. But the really bad victims, it turned out, were the newborns of the younger women. Starting off in the fetus allowed DDT to do major damage to future generations. "In general their children had more symptoms of allergies, including wheezing and rashes, and more frequent fevers than the children of women with lower levels of DDT," Conis says.
DDT is at bottom, a neurotoxin. And everyone everywhere now has DDT in their bodies. There is no getting away from it on this planet. From Antarctic penguins to American billionaires in their spaceships, DDT is now part of every living being. Big business has seen to that.
Males of every species were not spared either. DDT mimics estrogen. Males could develop minuscule reproductive organs, and sprout female nipples, or malfunctioning organs of both sexes. All through the animal kingdom, males have been incapable of mating, while both sexes have been dropping dead from the effects of DDT. Boys and girls have early onset of puberty from DDT, and women suffer miscarriages and thyroid conditions. And sadly, endocrine disruptors were so new at the time, it was far too easy not just to deny DDT as their cause, but to deny they existed at all.
There is an American Conservative meme that played a major role in the rise and resurrection of DDT. I call it Are you okay now. It is extreme short-term thinking that dictates no action be taken if everything seems fine at the moment. And as most people did not die immediately from the effects of DDT, therefore it was perfectly safe to use in homes, in and on people, and basically everywhere over the Earth. We saw this again when the COVID pandemic began. The US president himself claimed there were only 50 people who had it, so there was no point in mobilizing anyone or anything to deal with it. No action was taken until the bodies began piling up. If you didn't have COVID, there was nothing to worry about.
But there was plenty of backlash over DDT. Who caught the the direct fire of it was Rachel Carson, who had died decades earlier. She was vilified in the media and in Congress, called a paranoid liar and a mass murderer who killed more people than Hitler. All because she (correctly) predicted the effects of DDT. And wasn't around to defend herself.
The DDT ban was labeled ecoimperialism. Big Tobacco hired all the "professional science deniers" it could find, a tactic very much in evidence today over climate change. It helped Roger Bate create a global science-denying enterprise. This British curmudgeon had been denying the value of science for decades, and built an empire of global misinformation thanks to tobacco dollars. Philip Morris alone paid him ten thousand pounds sterling a month. America had its Elizabeth Whelan, accepted as a qualified pundit everywhere, in every medium. She was also expert at gathering dollars from a who's who of Fortune 500 firms. Conis says "they funded Bate, whose ESEF (European Science and Environment Forum) had previously denied the harms of secondhand smoke, endocrine disruption, and global warming. Now Bate authored a document titled 'International Public Health Strategy,' which wove its way through tobacco executives’ inboxes as the POPs (Persistent Organic Pollutants) convention brought DDT back into the public eye."
So DDT is back. It has been dropped from several international agreements limiting chemical poisons. Farmers demand it. It is safe and effective. There is no proof it has ever killed anyone. It helps produce abundant safe food, and is clearing the world of malaria. And if you believe all that, I have a bridge I'd like to offer you, connecting Brooklyn to Manhattan.
Conis says “'Like McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and Levi’s jeans,' wrote journalist Paul Thacker, at this point 'scientific disinformation is an iconic American product.'”
For Conis "It’s an illustration: of forces unseen, of values unacknowledged, and of the endless game of catch-up we play when we pollute first, regulate later; deploy first, study later; and act first, reflect later."
David Wineberg
If you liked this review, I invite you to read more in my book The Straight Dope. It’s an essay collection based on my first thousand reviews and what I learned. Right now it’s FREE for Prime members, otherwise — cheap! Reputed to be fascinating and a superfast read. And you already know it is well-written. https://www.amazon.com/Straight-Dope-...
November 27, 2023
When my father headed off to war in the Pacific theater in 1940, he stood a greater chance of dying from malaria than from enemy action. DDT came to the rescue.
In How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT, Elena Conis tells the story of DDT in three acts.
Act 1 starts with the discovery of DDT and its powerful insecticide properties. The rise came as DDT was mobilized to kill the mosquitos that spread the malaria parasite that was sickening troops. DDT ended the war a hero. In peacetime, production was ramped up dramatically. DDT was seen as a miracle – highly effective against insects but harmless to humans and animals. DDT was used not only against the mosquitos that spread malaria, but also against the flies that were thought to spread polio. There were just two problems. Flies didn’t spread malaria, and the flies were becoming resistant to DDT. DDT was also used against animal and crop pests and soon its use agricultural use of far outweighed its use in human health.
My earliest memory of DDT still wakes me up in the middle of the night. In 1957 I was at primary school in England. Mrs. Mauland, our second form teacher and farmer's wife, was telling us about the wonders of DDT when a classmate asked what it stood for.
"Oh, it doesn't matter, none of you could pronounce it anyway", she said. My hand shot up.
"I bet I could", I said. I had just learned from my father that my mother's Flit gun contained dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane.
"I'm sure you could, Professor Lovie", she said, witheringly.
I turned beet red, of course, from the shame of being caught in that most English of class-based sins, showing off, but also with anger at her ignorance trumping my knowledge. I decided on the spot to that I would be a scientist.
Act 2 started around the time of my embarrassment. Evidence started to pile up on the serious impacts of DDT on human and animal health. A nature writer called Rachel Carson started documenting these findings and in 1962 published her iconic book "Silent Spring". Elena Conis covers the decade of research, boycotts, hearing, and eventually lawsuits that led in 1972 to the EPA issuing a cancellation order for DDT based on its adverse environmental effects, such as those to wildlife, as well as its potential human health risks.
The year DDT was banned was the year I finished my undergraduate degree in chemistry. By then the environmental movement was becoming established, and I was determined to use my chemistry degree to make a difference. There were still no jobs in this new field of environmental science. I started work in electroplating with idea that I might put my skills to use in cleaning up that industry. My employer’s parent company, Hooker Chemical, would soon be embroiled in its own environmental disaster, the infamous Love Canal. That incident kicked off a proliferation of environmental regulations during the 1970s, culminating in CERCLA, commonly known as the Superfund Act in 1980.
In Act 3 of the DDT story, Conis shows that industry started to push back against environmental regulations, using the tobacco industry playbook of sowing doubt in science to the public and perhaps benefitting from the anti-government and free market ideologies of the 1980s.
By 1990 it had become clear to me that the electroplating industry had no intention of cleaning up its act and would rather move overseas than comply with regulation. I started my own business in and was soon writing software to help companies with regulatory compliance.
In 1999, the first case of West Nile virus in the US was identified in Queens, New York, and soon aerial and door to door spraying of insecticides resumed. I was sprayed from a helicopter while running in Cheesequake State Park, New Jersey, in the summer of 2000. The virus added to the pressure to bring back DDT.
Meanwhile a 50-year-old set of blood samples are helping establish the second and third generational effects of DDT exposure, including cancers. A massive 50-year-old dump of thousands of barrels of DDT waste products off the coast of California is still affecting wildlife today. Rosanna Xia’s LA Times article about that dump led me to her subsequent review of this book.
I was halfway through the book when the EPA announced updated lifetime health advisory limits for some of the "forever chemicals", known as PFAS or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, that have been found in drinking water and are also used in household products like waterproofing and food packaging. Like DDT, these were invented in the 1930s, thought to be harmless to health, and were widely used. Also, like DDT, they accumulate in the environment and in food chains, and have serious health effects. The new EPA lifetime health advisories for PFAS are so low that the EPA acknowledges that they are practically unobtainable, that we have all already exceeded them, and carry PFAS in our blood. The EPA is acknowledging that the stable door should be locked as the horse is already down the street and around the corner. The drinking water world, of which I'm part, is trying to figure out how to respond.
Elena Conis concludes that:
“All of this risks turning DDT’s story into yet a different sort of morality tale. More than that, however, it’s an illustration: of forces unseen, of values unacknowledged, and of the endless game of catch-up we play when we pollute first, regulate later; deploy first, study later; and act first, reflect later.”
In How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT, Elena Conis tells the story of DDT in three acts.
Act 1 starts with the discovery of DDT and its powerful insecticide properties. The rise came as DDT was mobilized to kill the mosquitos that spread the malaria parasite that was sickening troops. DDT ended the war a hero. In peacetime, production was ramped up dramatically. DDT was seen as a miracle – highly effective against insects but harmless to humans and animals. DDT was used not only against the mosquitos that spread malaria, but also against the flies that were thought to spread polio. There were just two problems. Flies didn’t spread malaria, and the flies were becoming resistant to DDT. DDT was also used against animal and crop pests and soon its use agricultural use of far outweighed its use in human health.
My earliest memory of DDT still wakes me up in the middle of the night. In 1957 I was at primary school in England. Mrs. Mauland, our second form teacher and farmer's wife, was telling us about the wonders of DDT when a classmate asked what it stood for.
"Oh, it doesn't matter, none of you could pronounce it anyway", she said. My hand shot up.
"I bet I could", I said. I had just learned from my father that my mother's Flit gun contained dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane.
"I'm sure you could, Professor Lovie", she said, witheringly.
I turned beet red, of course, from the shame of being caught in that most English of class-based sins, showing off, but also with anger at her ignorance trumping my knowledge. I decided on the spot to that I would be a scientist.
Act 2 started around the time of my embarrassment. Evidence started to pile up on the serious impacts of DDT on human and animal health. A nature writer called Rachel Carson started documenting these findings and in 1962 published her iconic book "Silent Spring". Elena Conis covers the decade of research, boycotts, hearing, and eventually lawsuits that led in 1972 to the EPA issuing a cancellation order for DDT based on its adverse environmental effects, such as those to wildlife, as well as its potential human health risks.
The year DDT was banned was the year I finished my undergraduate degree in chemistry. By then the environmental movement was becoming established, and I was determined to use my chemistry degree to make a difference. There were still no jobs in this new field of environmental science. I started work in electroplating with idea that I might put my skills to use in cleaning up that industry. My employer’s parent company, Hooker Chemical, would soon be embroiled in its own environmental disaster, the infamous Love Canal. That incident kicked off a proliferation of environmental regulations during the 1970s, culminating in CERCLA, commonly known as the Superfund Act in 1980.
In Act 3 of the DDT story, Conis shows that industry started to push back against environmental regulations, using the tobacco industry playbook of sowing doubt in science to the public and perhaps benefitting from the anti-government and free market ideologies of the 1980s.
By 1990 it had become clear to me that the electroplating industry had no intention of cleaning up its act and would rather move overseas than comply with regulation. I started my own business in and was soon writing software to help companies with regulatory compliance.
In 1999, the first case of West Nile virus in the US was identified in Queens, New York, and soon aerial and door to door spraying of insecticides resumed. I was sprayed from a helicopter while running in Cheesequake State Park, New Jersey, in the summer of 2000. The virus added to the pressure to bring back DDT.
Meanwhile a 50-year-old set of blood samples are helping establish the second and third generational effects of DDT exposure, including cancers. A massive 50-year-old dump of thousands of barrels of DDT waste products off the coast of California is still affecting wildlife today. Rosanna Xia’s LA Times article about that dump led me to her subsequent review of this book.
I was halfway through the book when the EPA announced updated lifetime health advisory limits for some of the "forever chemicals", known as PFAS or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, that have been found in drinking water and are also used in household products like waterproofing and food packaging. Like DDT, these were invented in the 1930s, thought to be harmless to health, and were widely used. Also, like DDT, they accumulate in the environment and in food chains, and have serious health effects. The new EPA lifetime health advisories for PFAS are so low that the EPA acknowledges that they are practically unobtainable, that we have all already exceeded them, and carry PFAS in our blood. The EPA is acknowledging that the stable door should be locked as the horse is already down the street and around the corner. The drinking water world, of which I'm part, is trying to figure out how to respond.
Elena Conis concludes that:
“All of this risks turning DDT’s story into yet a different sort of morality tale. More than that, however, it’s an illustration: of forces unseen, of values unacknowledged, and of the endless game of catch-up we play when we pollute first, regulate later; deploy first, study later; and act first, reflect later.”
May 28, 2022
This is one of those subjects that I previously had about one sentence worth of knowledge of. There's something really nice about getting the full picture and an in-depth understanding of something that was mostly an issue before I was born--though I didn't realize that DDT had something of a comeback.
For anyone of my generation, hearing a story like this immediately puts one in mind of the heroic Erin Brockovich. The story feels familiar. The truth is, there was industrial pollution before her case, and it continues today. There's no single Brockovich figure at the center of this fight, but the author sort of places writer Rachel Carson in the role--with a twist. And as I read, my admiration for science warred with my disdain for corporations. This whole story is horrific to read, with the knowledge of hindsight, but fascinating nonetheless.
For anyone of my generation, hearing a story like this immediately puts one in mind of the heroic Erin Brockovich. The story feels familiar. The truth is, there was industrial pollution before her case, and it continues today. There's no single Brockovich figure at the center of this fight, but the author sort of places writer Rachel Carson in the role--with a twist. And as I read, my admiration for science warred with my disdain for corporations. This whole story is horrific to read, with the knowledge of hindsight, but fascinating nonetheless.
January 16, 2026
Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) is one of the longest names for a chemical I have read in quite some time. This substance was created as an insecticide, and the effectiveness was such that people began spraying it and dusting it on everything with reckless abandon. It was especially effective in preventing the mosquito borne illness, known as malaria. This chemical compound is easily absorbed into soils, and stored in the fat of mammals. DDT is quite toxic, resulting in severe environmental impacts on pretty much the entire food chain and ecosystem. Some of the potential effects on humans are autism, low birth weight, premature birth, cancer, and miscarriage.
Despite being banned for years, testing today still shows the presence of DDT in certain regions. Chemical use has not decreased since the days of DDT. Contamination, improper storage, and improper disposal are issues that are ongoing today. The people in this book worked so hard and carried on a long and exhausting fight to prove that DDT was not safe and get it banned. I really do not understand people that think that there are not major environmental and climate issues today. It has to boil down to willful ignorance, which this book highlighted perfectly.
Despite being banned for years, testing today still shows the presence of DDT in certain regions. Chemical use has not decreased since the days of DDT. Contamination, improper storage, and improper disposal are issues that are ongoing today. The people in this book worked so hard and carried on a long and exhausting fight to prove that DDT was not safe and get it banned. I really do not understand people that think that there are not major environmental and climate issues today. It has to boil down to willful ignorance, which this book highlighted perfectly.
January 6, 2026
rating: 5/5 stars
~
private enemy number one anyone whose sucking the d*ck of corporations
~
private enemy number one anyone whose sucking the d*ck of corporations
January 29, 2024
not as interdisciplinary as i would’ve hoped but still fascinating!
March 22, 2023
In How to Sell a Poison by Elena Conis you will learn the depth that an industry will go to sell their product(s). The deceptions and falsehoods they will perpetuate are astounding. Never you mind that what they are selling is proven time and time again to be pure poison ( and thoroughly documented in this book ). They must have a right to sell it because, after all, they created it so it must be sold. No one is allowed to speak truth about their products without a swift well funded non-factual retaliation. The individual doesn’t stand a chance against the large corporation even when the individual has proof which Ms Conis impeccably documents. Law makers and regulatory agencies will be coerced or silenced into doing the corporations bidding.
We know most chemicals degrade slowly taking decades or much more to decay to a harmless state. EG - Because a rat eats an ounce of poison doesn’t mean the ounce of poison magically disappeared, the ounce of poison hasn’t changed, it’s still there and anything that eats the rat has that ounce of poison in it. Even when the rat simply decays into dirt. That dirt now has an ounce of poison in it. We use dirt for gardens and kids play in dirt. Decades later as we move to and from old and new places that old ounce of poison we didn’t know was there is easily stirred up. It belonged to the corporation that created it but they somehow bear no responsibility for where it’s left when they were the ones telling and in many cases forcing us to leave it behind?
This book brings together the far flung and buried facts that prove we need a third party system to test chemical agents before they are brought to the market. More importantly we need environmental justice and health monitoring for individuals and communities that are still documenting their exposures and devastatingly adverse experiences with chemicals that company had / have a right to sell but don’t seem to think they should be held to the responsibility to maintain safely. Full circle responsibility isn’t too much to ask from a company that demanded the right to sell their wears. How much did they spend to demand that right? It’s easy for a company to set aside a tiny portion of their profits they fought so hard to protect, if the chemical lasts for 50 years the funding to clean it up should too! Spend as much to protect the communities that bought your stuff!
We know most chemicals degrade slowly taking decades or much more to decay to a harmless state. EG - Because a rat eats an ounce of poison doesn’t mean the ounce of poison magically disappeared, the ounce of poison hasn’t changed, it’s still there and anything that eats the rat has that ounce of poison in it. Even when the rat simply decays into dirt. That dirt now has an ounce of poison in it. We use dirt for gardens and kids play in dirt. Decades later as we move to and from old and new places that old ounce of poison we didn’t know was there is easily stirred up. It belonged to the corporation that created it but they somehow bear no responsibility for where it’s left when they were the ones telling and in many cases forcing us to leave it behind?
This book brings together the far flung and buried facts that prove we need a third party system to test chemical agents before they are brought to the market. More importantly we need environmental justice and health monitoring for individuals and communities that are still documenting their exposures and devastatingly adverse experiences with chemicals that company had / have a right to sell but don’t seem to think they should be held to the responsibility to maintain safely. Full circle responsibility isn’t too much to ask from a company that demanded the right to sell their wears. How much did they spend to demand that right? It’s easy for a company to set aside a tiny portion of their profits they fought so hard to protect, if the chemical lasts for 50 years the funding to clean it up should too! Spend as much to protect the communities that bought your stuff!
January 12, 2022
This is a detailed history of the use of DDT and the battles among scientists, politicians, publicists, and people being sprayed against their will regarding its uses. A little too detailed at times, such as describing factories where it was manufactured. Fascinating facts at other times—I didn’t know that DDT had been sprayed to kill flies because some thought flies caused polio. And in an example of how everyone has an opinion, others claimed DDT caused polio.
General tactics from these past battles are listed which are obviously still being used in public debate: distract, discredit, distort, disrupt, and deny.
There is mention of Rachel Carson and wildlife of course, and possible human health effects of DDT and other pesticides. My attention was drawn to mention of how pesticides and the timing of exposure to them can affect the endocrine system and sexual development, and though the book doesn’t propose it, I wondered if that and the accumulation of these chemicals in our bodies may be related to the gender issues which have become more common in recent years.
At heart, DDT is just one example of the biggest failure of modern civilization—acting for short term benefit and profit, with ignorance and indifference to the long-term effects on the planet and ourselves.
Thanks to PublicAffairs and NetGalley for the advance copy to review.
General tactics from these past battles are listed which are obviously still being used in public debate: distract, discredit, distort, disrupt, and deny.
There is mention of Rachel Carson and wildlife of course, and possible human health effects of DDT and other pesticides. My attention was drawn to mention of how pesticides and the timing of exposure to them can affect the endocrine system and sexual development, and though the book doesn’t propose it, I wondered if that and the accumulation of these chemicals in our bodies may be related to the gender issues which have become more common in recent years.
At heart, DDT is just one example of the biggest failure of modern civilization—acting for short term benefit and profit, with ignorance and indifference to the long-term effects on the planet and ourselves.
Thanks to PublicAffairs and NetGalley for the advance copy to review.
August 6, 2022
Elena Conis lays out the case of DDT in "How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT" traces the origin and use of DDT from WW2 to post war America and the world. The effect of Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" and how the chemical industry fought for the continued use of that chemical and other deadly chemicals for their profit and to maximize agricultural profits without regard to environmental and human consequences.
This is a important addition to readers understanding how chemical industry and the use of advertising techniques to sow doubt and delay political action. The copy cat of the tobacco industry's delay has a crucial difference. DDT had a moral component which cigarettes did not- the worldwide effect to eradicate malaria.
However the battle to eliminate DDT is ongoing still. The original principals has long since passed but the scientific and legal legacies continue.
Highly recommended and is a case study in why the struggle can last decades for even a partial resolution to the use of DDT.
This is a important addition to readers understanding how chemical industry and the use of advertising techniques to sow doubt and delay political action. The copy cat of the tobacco industry's delay has a crucial difference. DDT had a moral component which cigarettes did not- the worldwide effect to eradicate malaria.
However the battle to eliminate DDT is ongoing still. The original principals has long since passed but the scientific and legal legacies continue.
Highly recommended and is a case study in why the struggle can last decades for even a partial resolution to the use of DDT.
Read
October 17, 2022A history of the manufacture, use, consequences and debate over DDT. Spanning roughly 80 years from World War II to the present, the story is told with heavy use of primary documents and sources. Reading it gives you a look into the challenges of regulation and the power of industry, activists and scientists in the fight over bans and restrictions on chemicals. The story touches on money in politics, environmental justice and racism, the history of environmentalism, the influence of the tobacco industry and much more. It's a look into the world that's left us a legacy of pollution and the difficulties combatting it.
September 25, 2022
I found the book to be quited interesting and somewhat unsettling. DDT and other poisons still threaten the environment. Ironically, with as much damage as these poisons can do, there have been and continue to be extensive life saving reasons to keep using them. It seems that we are continually faced with the dilemma of whether the benefits of such poisons outweigh the harm that they do to people directly and by way of the harm to the environment. Along with global warming such issues continue to face us.
A well written chronology of how such issues have been faced and how they continue to be of concern in the present. The book is quite lengthy but I found the time I spent with it was worthwhile.
A well written chronology of how such issues have been faced and how they continue to be of concern in the present. The book is quite lengthy but I found the time I spent with it was worthwhile.
May 10, 2022
This was a great history on DDT and the fight to have it removed. It follows the harmful effects it has had on people and the environment. The fight against the companies who fought back to keep it on the shelves for the singular purpose of gaining a profit over the lives that were greatly harmed by the product. This was a very interesting book on DDT and the fight to keep it off shelves to avoid the amount of destruction that it causes.
I would like to thank Bold Type Books for providing me with an ARC.
I would like to thank Bold Type Books for providing me with an ARC.
August 7, 2022
Ms Conis has laid out the story of DDT in an easy-to-follow chronological fashion. One thing I got from this is that all proponents and opponents of studies and legislation are funded by corporate interests that agree with the study's result. This means that everyone should do some critical thinking while looking at special interest papers. Who funds it and what result did they want?
April 28, 2023
Journalist Elena Conis deftly weaves the story of how chemicals synthesized in the service of wartime permeated the world and post-war America. DDT's inception as a wonder chemical to its reviled state today is a tale within multitudes which Conis artfully constructs. I highly recommend this book as the history of DDT is all too pertinent to many other environmental issues the world faces today.
May 8, 2022
Very interesting.
June 6, 2022
Fascinating, poignant, complex and nuanced. Simply wonderful if you're into understanding how exactly we got to this, the shittiest of places and what, if anything, we can do about it.
Read
July 13, 2022Amazing historical research of DDT that echos Rachel Carson's Silence Springs, but more nuance and complex in the time scale
July 28, 2022
A good explanation of DDT
March 31, 2024
Scary how the soil and water on the earth and in the oceans have been contaminated with chemicals that don’t break down. “As long as it makes money “. Tragic
January 5, 2025
*aggressively scrubs apples* (4.5 stars)
January 7, 2025
The biggest takeaway from this book is that Alex Jones was right about the frogs.
September 1, 2025
very interesting... very scawy... very informative
September 9, 2023
Elena Conis’ work will make you angry at hypercapitalism - corporations running amuck post-war and fighting off regulation with use of big advertising firms who are an important part of a scumbag economy.
They even ran a campaign to discredit Rachel Carson a decade after she died (she battled cancer as she wrote Silent Spring).
But also relief because many issues were improved on by the environment and civil rights activists, and also simple people who questioned injustice, many failing. Certainly don’t be dismissive about the hippies.
While this describe an ill of capitalism there were undeniable benefits of DDT use in malaria torn countries. Still the real cost to society there is unknown and there are US examples of significant brief. Tragically you may realise, the same pattern of abuse in tobacco and climate change. Well, also opioid use in the US.
While these battles are not over, there are so many people from the past who alight to improve their world and affected ours.
An eBook from NLB, read on Libby.
They even ran a campaign to discredit Rachel Carson a decade after she died (she battled cancer as she wrote Silent Spring).
But also relief because many issues were improved on by the environment and civil rights activists, and also simple people who questioned injustice, many failing. Certainly don’t be dismissive about the hippies.
While this describe an ill of capitalism there were undeniable benefits of DDT use in malaria torn countries. Still the real cost to society there is unknown and there are US examples of significant brief. Tragically you may realise, the same pattern of abuse in tobacco and climate change. Well, also opioid use in the US.
While these battles are not over, there are so many people from the past who alight to improve their world and affected ours.
An eBook from NLB, read on Libby.
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