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the work of the Owens brothers. In the late 1970s, the agency was agonizing over another study done at Colorado State University, in which scientists studied the long-term effects of acute poisoning by the same nerve poisons that had so damaged the migrants in the Owens study. In this case, researchers examined not just farmers and nursery workers but people who worked in pesticide-formulating plants, aircraft spray pilots, even an agricultural chemicals salesman.
    In their May 1980 report to the EPA, the scientists concluded that people exposed to acute poisoning with organophosphate pesticides—even just once in their entire lives—had experienced neurological problems, damage to fine motor and language functioning, and reduced memory and cognitive, intellectual, and perceptual function. Fully a quarter of the one hundred subjects suffered brain damage. 8
    The chemicals responsible for these life-threatening effects were primarily parathion, methyl parathion, and malathion—all nerve poisons. Methyl parathion caused 54 of the acute poisonings in Texas, while ethyl parathion was responsible for 42 acute poisonings, 24 of which took place in Colorado and 18 in Texas. In Colorado, malathion had poisoned six of the study subjects.
    Hale Vandermer, an EPA scientist, warned his bosses about the implication of the Colorado study. What if additional studies confirmed these findings? Could people exposed to nerve pesticides end up with shattered nervous systems or brain damage? If these results held up, Vandermer reasoned, the country would face “a health problem of epidemic proportions.” After all, he noted, beyond America’s farmers, more than 56 percent of American families use organophosphate pesticides to kill insects inside their homes. Vandermer prepared a memo for EPA’s top policy official, assistant administrator Steve Jellinek, but his warning never reached him. 9
    The Owens brothers’ work and the Colorado study had clearly unsettled senior EPA officials. Credible science was telling them the agrochemical nerve gases used by millions of farmers and urban residents were making people sick, even killing them outright. Their moral and legal obligation to protect public health ought to have convinced them to ban all those dangerous organophosphate toxins. But instead, they elected to look the other way, prolonging the profitable lives of these neurotoxins.
    Immediately after learning of the preliminary results of the Colorado study, EPA managers did two things. First, they put together a kind of Potemkin “farmworker program” right in the office of the top pesticides boss, Edwin Johnson.
    As I’ve already described, the late 1970s and early 1980s were an especially trying time for the EPA. The Agent Orange crisis, especially when 2,4,5-T and dioxin were found to have caused injury to women in Oregon, had forced the EPA to restrict (and finally ban) 2,4,5-T in 1983. Now organophosphates, which are central nervous system poisons, were being shown to cause brain damage in humans. The EPA’s political bosses decided that something had to be done: not to ban more chemicals, but to deflect public opinion from these findings. The “farmworker program” filled the bill.
    I spent a year working for this program, writing a series of memos about the harsh working conditions of farmworkers. But as admirable as the project may have seemed from the outside, in reality it was a pure public relations ploy: we put out press releases touting how much the government was doing to protect farmworkers who suffered the worst effects from organophosphates exposure. By the end of 1980, the EPA scientist James Boland had two thousand copies of the Colorado study. Yet few (if any) of those copies ever saw the light of day. Boland told me that the copies were warehoused in a government facility until the order came to trash them. 10
    Next, EPA senior managers canceled a special study of malathion, a parathion-like nerve toxin, being