SANDY BUCHANAN

MOYERS: The right to know, what does that mean?

BUCHANAN: It means giving, in this case, workers and residents of the community information about the names of the toxic chemicals that they are being exposed to either in the workplace or in their neighborhoods and then information about the health effects, the ways in which it can make you sick, either cancer or reproductive hazards.

MOYERS: So the whole idea was to enable people to find out what chemicals were being used in products, what effect they had on the workplace and their ordinary lives?

BUCHANAN: And, of course, the idea is that once people know, once people have that information, then they are going to want to take action. They will either fight for a safer workplace, look for substitutes in chemicals, or if they are a community organization, they may get together and talk to the company and say we don't want to be exposed to this anymore. It is funny to think of now, that it was actually news in 1980 that we didn't have the right to know. Some of these things we now take for granted -- that at least a worker in a workplace could get basic information about the name of a chemical or the safety data. But the reasons companies fought these right to know laws so hard both nationally and in Cincinnati, in Cleveland and everywhere else was liability. The idea that once a worker knows that he has been exposed to benzene, if he develops leukemia down the road, that connection might be made. There might be a lawsuit and other problems in the future. So getting rid of the right to know was a high priority for the chemical industry.

MOYERS: Was the explosion in 1984 at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, a factor in your consideration?

BUCHANAN: It became a big catalyst for the passage of right to know laws, particularly the federal right to know law. When the explosion occurred in India, of course, everybody's question in the United States and in Congress and everywhere else was, do we have that particular chemical here, do we have methyl isocyanate? And no one could answer the question.

MOYERS: Could it happen here?

BUCHANAN: Could it happen here? Is that chemical here? People tend to go to the very specific question. Is that chemical here? Could it hurt people? And there was no way to know because there was no national right to know law requiring that kind of reporting.

MOYERS: And then, soon thereafter, Proposition 65, the Right to know Initiative in California, was passed by a big majority of California voters. Did that have an influence on you in Ohio?

BUCHANAN: That had a huge influence on us in Ohio. In fact, we decided to try to bring Proposition 65 to Ohio, to have Ohio pass its own statewide right to know law through an initiative petition.

MOYERS: The industry took this as a wakeup call. The industry looked at what had happened in California and said we could have won if we just spent a little more money or a lot more money, and they started to do that.

BUCHANAN: And when we proposed the initiative in Ohio, we started to see chemical industry money flowing in from all over the country, including some of our own corporations like Procter & Gamble.

MOYERS: Let me to read you from a document from a meeting of the board of directors of the Chemical Manufacturers Association in White Sulfur Springs, West Virginia, on June 3, 1987. They say that they are calling for a new strategy to deal with Right to know Initiatives, and that that strategy includes "development of a funding plan which would include an industry- wide pledge of resources company by company." It would include "pre-authorization to commit the funds to individual state campaigns and pre-clearance of any legal hurdles to the contribution of such funds to state campaigns." Does that surprise you?

BUCHANAN: Well, it helps me understand why they were able to marshal their forces so quickly in Ohio and from so far across the country, the idea that they were ready for it and committed.

MOYERS: But you didn't know about this?

BUCHANAN: No. I didn't know about that until just now.

MOYERS: Another document reveals that they thought that they estimated that they would need for their state initiative funding to oppose initiatives in other states, that they would need between $25 million and $100 million.

BUCHANAN: Wow. Well, I guess they were planning for a lot of initiatives to come their way.

MOYERS: Though you didn't know it at the time, I assume you were up against a lot of that money?

BUCHANAN: We were up against about at least $4.8 million of it.

MOYERS: $4.8 million.

BUCHANAN: That was the final spending on the actual ballot campaign.

MOYERS: By the industry.

BUCHANAN: By the industry in Ohio. They definitely spent more money than that, though, because at every stage of the process through the legislature and others, they brought us to court and they tried to challenge the legality of our petitions. They created a coalition essentially to prepare for it. So they spent money all along the line.

MOYERS: So the industry spent $4.8 million on the ballot. And how much did you spend in trying to pass it?

BUCHANAN: Oh, about $150,000.

MOYERS: I would say you were outspent.

BUCHANAN: About 50 to 1 or so, yeah.

MOYERS: It took you a lot of hard work to get this initiative on the ballot, didn't it?

BUCHANAN: Oh, it did. We had to do two rounds of signature gathering, where we had to have 100,000 or so registered voters in Ohio sign the petitions. We had to take it before the legislature in the middle of that process. Ohio has a two-step legislative process. It was a tremendous amount of work, and it was a tremendously popular cause when we were taking it door to door. And even before the money started pouring in on the airwaves, polls were showing the initiative was ahead.

MOYERS: And the purpose of the initiative specifically stated was?

BUCHANAN: The initiative was to give Ohioans the right to know about their exposure to chemicals that could cause cancer and reproductive hazards, either on products through warning labels on products, or in their communities by requiring manufacturers to warn their neighbors about what they were exposing them to.

MOYERS: You say the industry spent a lot of money on advertising. Do you remember those ads?

BUCHANAN: Oh, sure.

MOYERS: Tell me about them.

BUCHANAN: They were preposterous in many respects. One, for example, would start with a lady looking like Betty Crocker in her kitchen, and she has got peanut butter and a piece of bread and says, "Did you know that peanut butter would have to be labeled under Issue 5?" and then warning signs would flash up. The industry paid for its own economic study of what they said the results would be, and then broadcast this study, which was an outlandish study.

But they had the money to say whatever they wanted, first saying it would cost a billion dollars and 10,000 jobs in Ohio, later saying it would cost $2.2 billion and 17,000 jobs. So we saw a lot of commercials talking about the billion-dollar label law. They used the ultimate weapon in Ohio which is to threaten jobs, the idea that this law would somehow take away thousands of jobs. So we would have workers in a commercial discussing whether they would lose their jobs.

MOYERS: And you said that the industry supported its own "independent study"?

BUCHANAN: Yes.

MOYERS: And that study found that jobs would be lost?

BUCHANAN: Oh, the study found thousands of jobs would be lost and huge expenses, expenses that if anyone took the time to really document would be very hard to verify, saying a small business would have to spend $100,000 on mailings to their neighbors. It was crazy, but they had the money to broadcast it as if it were the truth.

MOYERS: Did anyone point out that this independent study was actually funded by the chemical industry?

BUCHANAN: Well, we did, and a number of reporters noticed it in the print media, but that wasn't what people were hearing. What they were seeing was the TV commercials.

MOYERS: Given that the industry has millions of dollars to spend on the industry and you spent--what did you say?

BUCHANAN: About $150,000.

MOYERS: How did you respond to the exaggerations, to the lies?

BUCHANAN: Well, all we could do at that point was to try to get the word out through grass roots outreach, through the media. We tried to organize some high-profile media events. Ralph Nader came in and debated in favor of the initiative, which brought in more interest from the press, but there was no way we could combat them on the airwaves.

MOYERS: And what about the editorials? What did the newspapers do?

BUCHANAN: The editorials almost universally were against the initiative. Again, there was a lot of lobbying that went on by the chemical industry for projecting a certain image of what would happen in Ohio, really true hysteria that they were ginning up about all the things that would happen and crazy stories that would take up a very small part of something in the initiative and then blow it way out of proportion.

One of their favorites was--we had a requirement that a company that was exposing its neighbors to cancer-causing chemicals or chemicals that could cause reproductive harm at a certain level would have to mail a notice to people in a 2-mile radius to let them know -- again, an attempt to spur reduction of those chemicals.

Well, that turned into in some of the stories that any woman taking a birth control pill would have to mail a notice to all of her neighbors in a 2-mile radius. And these stories would be repeated. Or that any farmer applying a chemical to his lawn would have to mail a notice to a 2- mile radius.

MOYERS: A real fear campaign.

BUCHANAN: Yes, it was.

MOYERS: There was an editorial in the Columbus Dispatch, a paper that opposed you. Let me read to you from it. "The chemicals have one thing in common. They cause cancer or birth defects in rats or other animals when given in high doses. Most significant, however, is that there is little or no scientific proof with nearly all the products containing these elements of any risks when used as intended." You are smiling.

BUCHANAN: Yes.

MOYERS: Why?

BUCHANAN: Well, partly because those words came almost directly out of the promotional pieces, the PR pieces that the industry coalition was using against us.

MOYERS: The newspaper editorial?

BUCHANAN: The newspaper editorial arguments are exactly what was in the materials, the briefing book put out.

MOYERS: Without attribution.

BUCHANAN: That's right. Put out by the chemical industry.

MOYERS: They didn't say this is what the chemical industry says.

BUCHANAN: Right, but the arguments are those exactly.

MOYERS: What about the argument?

BUCHANAN: The argument is crazy. People use laboratory tests because mammals do have similar characteristics, and we don't test cancer-causing chemicals on people. Also, the idea that only large doses cause cancer is completely wrong. In fact, one of the most dangerous things about cancer is that very small doses, if it hits the right person at the right time, can cause cancer, just as much as a high dose can. So those were arguments designed to scare people or just to convince them that we were, you know, crazy.

MOYERS: They say that there is "little or not scientific proof." Couldn't that be turned around that there is little or no proof precisely because the chemicals had not been tested?

BUCHANAN: Absolutely. And very, very few chemicals that are in commerce do get any kind of rigorous testing before they go on the market.

MOYERS: In other words, there is no evidence that these chemicals are harmful to your health, but there is also no evidence that they are not.

BUCHANAN: If you don't look for it, you won't find it. But there is another side to that argument, too, which is that of the thousands of chemicals in commerce, only several hundred have been really singled out as cancer-causing chemicals. And that was one of the things that we were trying to get across to people as well, we are looking at the most dangerous substances.

MOYERS: One of the most surprising documents that we came across is dated August the 31, 1987. Let me read you this. I assume you haven't seen this before.

BUCHANAN: No, I haven't.

MOYERS: This is an internal document of the Health Effects Committee of the Chemical Manufacturing Association board of directors. They are meeting in Pebble Beach in California, and the minutes of the meeting record that the chemical industry has contended that "while a few substances pose a real risk to human health when sufficient exposure occurs, the vast majority of chemicals do not pose any substantial threat to health. However, the problem is very little data exists to broadly respond to the public's perception and the charges of our opponents." They are saying they don't really know if they are dangerous or not, that there is no evidence.

BUCHANAN: They haven't conducted the studies or they don't want to for some reason let people know what they know.

MOYERS: The fact is there is simply no data available for most of the chemicals that are in circulation.

BUCHANAN: That's correct.

MOYERS: Were you able to get that message out against this barrage of advertising?

BUCHANAN: We were really able to get very little across to the general public against the barrage. We were zeroing in on those few chemicals that there was real solid evidence on that can cause cancer, but once the initiative hit the television advertising stage, at that point we were on the defensive, and the message was so thorough. We have a large door-to-door canvassing program. We knock on people's doors all around Ohio, and what we would find is when we knocked on doors, we'd say, "Vote 'yes' on Issue 5." But people would say, "We are supposed to vote 'no' on Issue 5." That message had thoroughly penetrated both on the airwaves and in people's workplaces.

MOYERS: So the legs of citizens were no match for the lies of television.

BUCHANAN: That's right.

MOYERS: You were facing some stiff opposition. Did you know that some of that was coming from Washington?

BUCHANAN: We knew there was national involvement. We didn't know exactly who it was.

MOYERS: And you were seeing the consequences of all this money flowing in.

BUCHANAN: Yes.

MOYERS: Did you know that some of that came from industry after Proposition 65 had passed and the industry set up this financing mechanism for dealing with other initiatives from different states?

BUCHANAN: No, we didn't know that.

MOYERS: Well, here is a document also from the chemical industry. It is dated June 3, 1992, and there is a meeting going on of the industry. Here's what it says, "Mr. Peppercorn reviewed the status of the Ohio Proposition 65 ballot initiative and the broad-based industry program to defeat it. He requested activation of the CMA, the Chemical Manufacturing Association, State Initiative Contingency Fund in the amount of $720,000 which he expected would meet the chemical industry's fair share. Ohio-based companies or those with a particularly large presence in the State would be urged to contribute more, and then they would take a vote and approve," – according to these minutes – "the triggering of the State Initiative Contingency Fund in the amount of $720,000 for the Ohio initiative."

BUCHANAN: There we go.

MOYERS: And after that, what happened?

BUCHANAN: After that, we saw money from them and others around the country. They came in and seemed to be buying an endless amount of TV time and also other materials that were appearing. We would be hearing back from dry cleaners, small businesses, others, but more from employees of large corporations who would, for example, get a notice in their pay check, which is a pretty insidious place to put a notice, that they should vote "no" on Issue 5 and that Ohio jobs would be lost if Issue 5 passed. So, if you get a notice in your paycheck saying jobs will be lost if an issue passes and you better vote "no," that is a pretty strong message.

MOYERS: Would jobs have been lost in your reckoning?

BUCHANAN: No, I don't think so. We had looked very carefully at the impact of Proposition 65 in California, and there were some investigation that had gone on because by that time it was a few years old. The Federal Government had done a study. In fact, William Riley, who was then head of the EPA, had written a very strong letter to Louis Sullivan in the Cabinet also saying that it had a very minimal economic impact, you couldn't point to anything negative, and that it was very hard to argue against just giving people information.

MOYERS: There is no record that any jobs were lost in California. When you look at the record, it just doesn't support that?

BUCHANAN: In fact, you would not be surprised if jobs were created because, as you push for alternative chemicals, safer substitutes, new processes, you are going to create new jobs.

MOYERS: Lots of those who spent money to defeat your Issue 5 in Ohio were also spending money to defeat other efforts by other citizens in other states. Did you know that?

BUCHANAN: We knew a little bit at the time, but we didn't have a lot of details about what was going on in other states.

MOYERS: Well, the record shows at least 20 major contributors to "Ohioans for Responsible Health Information." That is the opposition group, right?

BUCHANAN: That is a wonderful name, isn't it?

MOYERS: "Ohioans for Responsible Health Information." They also contributed heavily to campaigns to defeat recycling initiatives in Massachusetts and Oregon and to defeat the next Proposition 65 in California. They were on a nationwide effort to spend money to defeat citizens' initiatives.

BUCHANAN: And I think they were very worried about the danger of Proposition 65 taking flight and being picked up in other states. So they thought the most decisive thing to do was to kill it off when they could.

MOYERS: They were afraid of the domino effect.

BUCHANAN: Absolutely.

MOYERS: And if you had passed Issue 5 in Ohio, they might have had real reason to be concerned.

BUCHANAN: Yes. Between Ohio and California, those are both very significant markets in the United States. So, if we had had the success in passing it, we would have had companies affected in great numbers, having to warn consumers about the dangers of their products.

MOYERS: One of the other documents we found says that the Chemical Manufacturers Association State Contingency Fund had been activated five times beginning in 1989 I will just read it. "Contingency Fund pledges have been activated five times."

One, in 1989, it was activated to finance industry opposition to an initiative in Massachusetts. Two, in 1990, it was activated in three phases to support the winning campaign against the new initiative in California.

Three, in 1992, it was activated twice, first to oppose the right to know initiative in Ohio and then to provide $500,000 to the successful campaign against the first initiative of its kind in Massachusetts. Then, in 1994, it was activated again in two phases with contributions totaling nearly $800,000 to oppose a ballot measure in Massachusetts, prohibiting corporate contributions to ballot campaigns. That is right out of their record. Why do you think they would spend so much money to defeat a proposal in Massachusetts that limited the capacity of corporations to send money to the defeat of these initiatives?

BUCHANAN: One of the big loopholes in campaign finance laws in general is that, where corporations can't contribute directly to a candidate, they can contribute right out of their corporate coffers to initiative campaigns in a lot of states. I know that is true in Ohio. They really need to leave themselves that option open. To spend this kind of money, they have to be able to do it from their corporate coffers.

MOYERS: In only three states, according to this document, the Contingency Fund, which was just the industry's effort, not the total corporate funding, had spent more than $3 million. I suppose that doesn't surprise you.

BUCHANAN: It doesn't. I think it was also used probably as seed money to convince other corporations, "We are putting in this much now, you have got to ante up your share." We got hold of documents from a group. The coalition Ohioans for Responsible Health Information had a dues schedule for companies in Ohio. If you have this many employees and this million dollars in sales, then you might have to pay $5,000 or $2,000 just to be part of that coalition, and then, of course, some of the leaders of that, like Procter & Gamble, put in hundreds of thousands of dollars into the effort.

MOYERS: What does it say that a powerful industry, the chemical industry in this case, with its money can buy what it wants from a state legislature or from a United States Congress and can also broadcast the kind of propaganda of fear and misinformation that causes citizens to vote against their self-interest?

BUCHANAN: It says we have a long way to go in both educating the citizens, but more importantly figuring out how we can -- I hate to say -- "level the playing field." We will never have that much money. But create situations where you really could get a true message across. The only thing we know is you have to have a vested interest on your side to maybe try to compete with their money, but there is no way that a citizen's non-profit organization can compete with that kind of money.

MOYERS: How long have you been doing this?

BUCHANAN: I have been doing this since 1977.

MOYERS: More than 25 years.

BUCHANAN: Yes.

MOYERS: Why do you do it?

BUCHANAN: I do it because, first of all, I believe it is the right thing to do. We see every day people in Ohio whose lives have been changed by their kids getting cancer, because of toxic exposures or someone in the workplace who is dying of a lung disease from workplace exposure.

You have got to do something to try to change things. And we have seen a lot of successes. This initiative was a failure, but we have seen a lot of progress in individual companies making changes when subjected to public pressure. We have seen the right to know laws pass, which have been a terrific force for pollution reduction, the Toxics Reporting Inventory and information in chemicals. And we see wonderful people all the time working hard, and we just believe it is the right thing to do.

MOYERS: What did you learn in all of this about the chemical companies?

BUCHANAN: We have learned that they are willing to be very unscrupulous, to say what they think will advance their cause even if the information really wouldn't be there to back it up. They can be quite ruthless. We had a lot of attacks on our organization through this initiative where they would try to kill the messenger, so to speak, say that we were really out to do this for our own benefit.

It was a provision in the law that said citizens living near a facility could actually apply for a technical assistance grant to get their own help if they were exposed to toxic chemicals, and that was -- we would not have been eligible for the money -- but that didn't stop the chemical industry from saying over and over again, that this was just an attempt by Ohio Citizen Action to fund itself. So we went through some pretty nasty moments during this.

MOYERS: They are very rich.

BUCHANAN: They are very rich.

MOYERS: And they are very ruthless?

BUCHANAN: They are ruthless. And they seem to be motivated mostly as we see from, again, trying to avoid this liability, trying to keep anybody from getting their foot in the door in the area of right to know, and we are now seeing new attempts to undermine right to know laws in Ohio and other States.

MOYERS: How so?

BUCHANAN: Well, particularly something that has the unlikely name of the "audit privilege." It is an attempt by companies to keep information secret not only from the neighbors of the facility, but from the EPA, and even in court when they have information about their environmental violations or tests or photographs or anything that might reveal a problem on their site.

MOYERS: So, if they do a self-audit, and they find that they have made a mistake, broken a law, violated some health requirement, they can refuse to disclose what they have found?

BUCHANAN: Right. They essentially slap a cover on it, call that information privileged, and say that you can't get at it.

MOYERS: So we will never know if they found something that they had done wrong -- or if they had corrected it.

BUCHANAN: That's right, and their goal, of course is largely to try to prevent citizens from being able to file their own lawsuits for enforcement. When you look at the history of this issue in the United States, most of the very serious complicated cases end up with citizens having to get their own attorneys, because the enforcement agencies are not doing their jobs. But if the industries can prevent those neighbors from getting access to the smoking guns or those documents they need to file a case, they are way ahead of the game.

MOYERS: Have you tracked the contributions of chemical companies and other corporations to the state legislature in Ohio around this issue of audit privilege?

BUCHANAN: Yes, we have. We tracked every company that registered as lobbying for the audit privilege law and looked at their contributions across the board to legislators and found that they were outspending the proponents 5-to-1.

MOYERS: So the audit privilege laws could put us back in the dark. It could make it likely that we would never again know what chemical companies had found that they were doing wrong or what they had done, if anything, to fix it.

BUCHANAN: That's right. That's the whole idea, and that is why they have pushed so hard for these laws across the country.

MOYERS: Have folks in Ohio found out some things on their own that proved important to them in this area?

BUCHANAN: Oh, absolutely. It happens every day and usually requires an awful lot of digging by a citizen. For example, a woman in a town not too far from Cincinnati came home one day to find her son lying almost comatose on their couch.

She couldn't figure out what was going on. She got him out of the house, got him to the emergency room. It turned out he had been subjected to a huge level of carbon monoxide, much higher than, you know, even someone would be suspected to survive. That was coming from a nearby steel plant.

She had to push and push to find that out. The steel company didn't want to tell her. This kind of thing happens all the time where people have to become detectives, and with things like audit privilege and secrecy laws, that detective activity is shut down.

MOYERS: What does it say to us that the chemical companies do not want that woman to find out what happened to her son, they don't want citizens to have the right to know, they spent huge sums of money to make sure state and state legislatures and the Congress don't press very hard, write standards that are acceptable to industry? What does that say to you that in one case after another on one front after another, in one year after another, the chemical industry digs its heels in and says we don't want people to know?

BUCHANAN: What it says to me is they don't want to be held liable. Somewhere in there, somewhere there is a conscience. Somewhere, they know they have hurt people, but if they can't be held liable, if the tools that citizens or workers can use to try to defend themselves are taken away, then you can protect the bottom line of a corporation.

MOYERS: It would cost them money if people knew.

BUCHANAN: It would absolutely cost them money. They would be in court. They would be having to pay out benefits. Hopefully, they would be paying punitive damages, and they wouldn't be able to do the kinds of things they have been doing for so many years.

MOYERS: You are not naturally opposed to corporations, are you?

BUCHANAN: No, no. They are here to stay. We would like to see corporations acting in the interest of their community and particularly in a way that does establish trust and exchange of information. That is the best possible outcome of these things.

MOYERS: And we all enjoy the fruits of the chemical revolution of the last 50 years. It has made a huge difference in our standard of life.

BUCHANAN: Yes, although I think there are lots of decisions that could have been made along the way that would have made it much safer for people. There are fruits of the industry certainly in a lot of products, but, unfortunately, there is also a lot of not-so-nice fruits, people who have been hurt, who have died, who haven't been able to have children, who have had kids born with birth defects, all because the proper safety precautions weren't taken when they should have been.