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
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