INTRODUCTION:
In 1970, when the Environmental Protection
Agency was first created, I was among a small group of active members of
Congress who understood we were at the precipice of a new era in public
health. The disasters of Love Canal and Times Beach Missouri, in which
the environmental sins of chemical manufacturing plants left entire communities
homeless and stricken with fatal diseases, hit the nation like a tidal
wave. For the first time, we were beginning to comprehend the sheer vastness
and complexity of environmental dangers of the modern industrial era and
the perils - many of them invisible to the naked eye - that were lurking
in our air, waterways, consumer products, and workplaces.
During that pivotal decade in which
the modern environmental movement came to the forefront of the nation's
political agenda, Dr. Epstein wrote the epochal Politics of Cancer. It
was a bombshell both inside and outside of Washington officialdom, and
its vast media coverage sent warning bells throughout the nation.
What made The Politics of Cancer so
unique was its fusion of science with politics. For the first time, the
intimidatingly complex scientific data and facts of asbestos, vinyl chloride,
benzene, and hundreds of other toxic threats were demystified and explained
in the context of a political, social, and cultural evolution. Any layperson
who knew nothing about which chemicals were dangerous and how Washington
reacted to the grave dangers could come away after having read the Politics
with an expertise in both. It was an education for the public and a handbook
for decision-makers. The book also carefully documented startling evidence
of corporate decisions to withhold data from Congress and the public about
a vast array of public health dangers, thereby frustrating the institutional
wheels of democracy to protect the public - evidence which spawned a new
wave of legislation to criminalize the withholding of vital health and
safety data.
This milestone work was not just a
wake-up call to the nation, it was also a call to arms for those of us
both inside and outside the beltway, Republican and Democrat, young and
old, to reclaim our fundamental rights to a safe environment for ourselves
and our families. The work served as a treatise for us in the Congress
as we fought in the 1980s for the enactment of a half dozen landmark
environmental laws, including the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, the
Toxic Substances
Control Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, and much else.
During the intervening two decades
since Dr. Epstein first wrote the book, there has been a major shift in
the political and cultural landscape. As we enter the year 2000, cancer
is well on its way to becoming the nation's number one killer, taking 500,000
lives and bilking our purses of well over $110 billion every year. A sense
of crisis - sometimes even panic - grips the public when the word "cancer"
is spoken, but a sense of paralysis seems to characterize our institutional
ability to confront this aggressor.
Inevitably, any public crisis will
spawn institutions. During the past two decades, we have seen the birth
and maturation of what Dr. Epstein calls the "Cancer Establishment" - the
National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, and the myriad
of research centers - all of whom have been trusted explicitly by the government
and implicitly by the American people as the high generals in the war against
cancer. What Dr. Epstein charges is that these generals are losing the
war, and losing it badly. As we did in 1978 when The Politics of Cancer
was first published, we should today hear this clarion call.
Most disturbingly, Dr. Epstein chronicles
how the Cancer Establishment has nearly totally ignored cancer prevention,
ignored the most common sense proposition that we should simply keep poison
out of our communities and immediate surroundings. Every parent tells their
child the common-lore adage that a "stitch in time saves nine," but this
simple truth seems to have eluded those entrusted with waging one of the
most important public policy objectives of the latter part of the century,
according to this book.
Simply put, the evidence seems to adduce
that our ability to cure and treat cancer has not materially changed in
recent decades while the incidence of fatal cancers spins out of control
as our communities become increasingly drenched with carcinogens. Given
this evidence which fundamentally questions our ability to "cure" our way
out of the cancer problem it appears clear that no solution will work without
a comprehensive national program to prevent our people from being exposed
to poisons in the first place.
With all the data available clearly
demonstrating environmental causes of cancer, one might reasonably ask
why there has been less focus on cancer prevention both in and out of the
Cancer Establishment. The Politics of Cancer Revisited attempts to answer
that question, and in so doing, attempts to show us the way out of our
current fix.
In short, this new book argues that
the Cancer Establishment has become beset with a range of myopic institutional
pressures which prevent it from devoting more research and capital to prevention:
the common quest to amass more resources and build bigger empires by the
research institutions which promise what may be a mythical pot of gold
at the end of the research rainbow; the apparently growing and somewhat
disturbing interlocking corporate interests of pharmaceutical industries
who benefit from public optimism that an elixir is near, and chemical industries
that want as little prevention through environmental regulation as possible.
While political scientists commonly theorize that all institutions may
be subject to these pressures, no one has attempted to systematically document
these problems in the context of the war against cancer until now.
None of this is to say that research
into the mechanisms, treatment and potential cures of cancer is not critical
or that it should not continue. It should. None of this is to say that
there are not noble people struggling to find cures. There are. But, The
Politics of Cancer Revisited argues that as important as the research is,
it cannot eclipse prevention. We should not in our emotionally understandable
hope for a cure become transfixed with a Nero-like neglect for the simple
truth that preventing cancer appears to be well within our grasp. This
is the thesis of The Politics of Cancer Revisited, and Americans in all
quarters would be well advised to heed it very carefully.
Congressman John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.)
August 1998