Chemophobia Part Two: The Growth of Chemophobia

As we explored in the last post, chemophilia arose in the early 20^th century through the Second World War. However, as Jon Entine explores, complications soon arose. In 1948, at Donora, Pennsylvania, noxious smog from two industrial plants descended for five days, sickening thousands and leaving the town far worse than it had been before. In 1952, a similar smog event happened in London, sickening 100,000 and killing thousands. This hit society hard, and a steady trend from chemophilia began.

Through the 1950s, concern grew over these chemical pollutants, and as before, Americans overreacted to compensate for the change. The first real overreaction manifested itself in the Delaney Clause, in which any substance that causes cancer in any dose in any species was deemed “unsafe.” This blatantly violated a fundamental principle of toxicity: the dose makes the poison. This amendment, in turn led to another national overreaction around cranberries near Thanksgiving 1959. These fears subsided when presidential candidates Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy publicly ate cranberries, but a new crisis would soon develop, and this time, it would be more legitimate.

In 1957, a new “miracle drug” was released in West Germany, advertised as a cure to insomnia, coughs, colds, headaches, and morning sickness. This drug grew in popularity, spreading to other countries. It was then discovered, however, that this drug was causing birth defects. Thalidomide was never FDA approved in the United States, but nonetheless, millions of tablets had been sent to United States doctors for clinical testing, and so, in 1961, it was pulled from the market. This stunned the country and led to significant reforms, including stricter testing requirements, but it also fed fears: might the government not be able to do enough to protect the citizens from these chemical dangers? Once again, Americans were faced with a changing world, and they were getting even more jittery.

While all this was going on, this jitteriness was manifesting itself in a prevailing philosophy of the time: postmodernism. At the time, of course, the nuclear age was just getting underway, with the first nuclear bombs having been dropped in 1945 and unleashing a feeling of horror that soon culminated in an arms race of epic proportions. Anxiety was the prevailing feeling, and that translated into postmodernism, which grew out of those bombs and the newfound anxiety that science could lead to the extinction of the human race. And so, faced with changes caused by science that it was not prepared for, American society looked upon that science as something to be anxious of.

In 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, in which she fought against DDT and essentially launched the environmental movement. A chemophobic perception, that government couldn’t stop chemicals and that corporations wouldn’t, now took hold. After this, the fear and overreactions kept rolling in. In 1969, the cyclamate scare, where cyclamates were banned based on very spurious evidence, once again demonstrated the fundamental insecurity that the American society felt. The most striking overreaction was California’s Proposition 65, which created a list of remotely potentially hazardous chemicals and required businesses that might potentially expose the consumers to any chemical on that list to post the now-ubiquitous warning: “This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.” This, as Entine notes, scared Californians with no measurable benefit.

By the 1990s, chemophobia was well entrenched. A prime example: the now-infamous and still-influential Wakefield Study, in which Andrew Wakefield “conducted” a “study” (both terms used loosely) that, through the magic of fabricated results, claimed that the MMR vaccine was linked to autism and bowel disease. This study, horrendous and fraudulent as it is, is still widely responsible for fears of vaccines and increased chemophobia.

I could list more examples, but the point is this: as the society began changing the way they saw chemicals, they overreacted, causing more change and more overreaction. And so, in that positive feedback loop, we have gotten to where we are today.