AL MEYERHOFF

MEYERHOFF: We are truly the children of the chemical age, and the boomers especially are the first generation that have been exposed to thousands of different chemicals in their food, in their water, in their air, in the workplace and elsewhere.

It is a new phenomenon. It is a new technology, if you will, at this level that came onto the market. And for the first 20 years of that, there was precious little attention to health and safety or environmental effects.

Then, in the 1970s, the Congress started to respond. You had, of course, "Silent Spring" and the kickoff of the entire environmental movement about chemicals, about DDT in particular, and you had a strategy of the chemical industry that was adopted then that has been extraordinarily effective and still is.

And that strategy was to delay and deny and evade as much as possible- with an emphasis on Delay- and then where necessary and only under enormous pressure, to make a concession on a particular chemical and perhaps co-opt the public a little bit along the way. But the basic approach of putting very high-risk products onto the market and then squeezing every dollar of profit out of them, even when they have become obsolete, even when the hazards become known, was their policy throughout the '70s.

It is their policy now. In the 1970s, Congress, under a great deal of pressure from the public and from the environmentalists, adopted a set of statutes. They adopted one law called "FIFRA," the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, which is the nation's principal pesticide law. They adopted TSCA, the Toxic Substances Control Act, although we refer to it as the "Toxic Substances Conversation Act."

MOYERS: Because?

MEYERHOFF: Because what those laws did and where the chemical industry really won that debate was that while they accepted the notion that individual chemicals under worst-case scenarios should be regulated, they built in obstacle after obstacle and process after process where it is virtually impossible to get a known high-risk chemical off the market.

There have been very few- if you look at the whole entire history of the environmental movement- chemicals that have been actually banned because of their health risks. That is because chemicals get far more due process than people do.

MOYERS: Chemicals have more rights than people?

MEYERHOFF: Far more rights than people. Some examples -- EDB which is a very high- risk pesticide, and DBCP, a reproductive toxicant and a very powerful carcinogen. DBCP was found in drinking water wells throughout the country.

There was a billion-dollar lawsuit in California about DBCP getting into drinking water. It stayed on the market notwithstanding overwhelming evidence for more than a decade because to ban it, you first had to have an administrative process within a government agency that was under great political pressure from powerful people on Capitol Hill.

Then, when you finished that process, which took years, there was a full administrative hearing with an administrative law judge where you put on expert witnesses. If you won that, which the government did, then the chemical company went to the federal courts and got a trial de novo and started the process again.

You see where I'm going here. If you put enough hurdles up and combine that with the extraordinary resources of lawyers and experts and doctors and political lobbyists and others on the other side, even the best-intentioned government regulator is hamstrung.

MOYERS: So, by the late 1970s, however, there was an effort to change this, to get the public's right to know ahead of the chemical's right to exist?

MEYERHOFF: Correct. There was a well-intentioned and largely unsuccessful effort to finally force the chemical industry to fully test their products, to disclose the information that they already had about adverse health effects of their products, again, under TSCA and under a variety of other federal laws.

You have what is charitably called an enormous data gap where a lot of these chemicals have never been tested for their ability to cause cancer or birth defects or nerve damage, other kinds of chronic health effects, but they are put on the market irrespective of the absence of that data.

Then you have a subset of chemicals where the industry has done testing, in-house testing, but has kept it secret, has not disclosed it to the public, has not disclosed it to the government, not unlike the tobacco industry experience where they are fully aware of the hazards of these products and have known about them years.

MOYERS: So there is a data gap and an exposure gap?

MEYERHOFF: That's right.

MOYERS: We don't know a lot about a lot of chemicals, but what we do know about some chemicals is largely kept secret?

MEYERHOFF: That's exactly right. You have a situation where most of the chemicals that are in our water, our food, our air, elsewhere, we don't even know what the health effects are. But for those most toxic of chemicals, where some testing has been required or done, the norm in the '70s and the '80s and actually sometimes even now, is for the industry to simply sit on the data.

It is not in their economic interest to disclose that information, and there are very few laws that actually require them, even when there is a known hazard, to make the public or the government aware of it. That is changing now.

MOYERS: So what happened after the Carter administration attempted to find out what was going on, to ask the chemical companies to publish what they were doing?

MEYERHOFF: Well, I mean, quite clearly, the greatest setback for the effort of the environmentalists and the public health community to regulate toxic chemicals, was the Reagan revolution.

When President Reagan took office, he brought into office people from the regulated industry, who were entirely sympathetic to that industry. You will remember regulatory reform and what was called then the Bush Task-Force, which was set up by then-Vice President Bush, and all of that was set up to shut down even those meager efforts by government agencies to force disclosure of health effects, to regulate individual chemicals.

MOYERS: Did meetings between company officials and government officials take place behind closed doors?

MEYERHOFF: Yes. My organization, the Natural Resources Defense Council, brought litigation then against the head of EPA, challenging hundreds of closed- door, secret meetings with the major pesticide and other chemical manufacturers, where the fundamental decision of whether a chemical was going to stay on the market or not was being made in private, in secret.

What we learned from that litigation, we knew what was going on within the government because frankly this was a government that was hostile to their very mission of protecting the public health.

What was interesting is that through the subpoena power in that case and the discovery, we also learned what was going on within these chemical companies because we obtained their data. And the amount of knowledge and awareness of the overarching data demonstrating health hazards and their willingness to simply cover it up -- and their willingness to keep that product on the market and squeeze every last dollar out of it -- was just truly astounding.

The other part of the puzzle is that very powerful people in the Congress had very heavy influence over the regulator. So you had a sympathetic-to-the-industry government regulator, a very powerful industry and very powerful people on Capitol Hill -- all trying to thwart the basic intent of the statute, which was to protect the public health.

MOYERS: Here is a quote from one of those documents. June 4, 1981. This is from the chemical industry from records taken during the discovery process.

MEYERHOFF: Yes.

MOYERS: "Shortly after taking office, President Reagan directed EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, to delay proposing or finalizing regulations until it could be determined that they were cost effective and necessary. As a result, the number of pages in recent issues of the federal register has plunged. Top-level administrators seem to have more palatable views, and there is a new open-door policy at the agency." Any surprises there?

MEYERHOFF: No. That was pretty much par for the course then. We have a new "friendship" was the term that was being used then a lot. "Task forces" were being used a lot, task forces being limited to the representatives of the chemical companies and the government, not the environmentalists, not labor unions, not citizens of the country, all with the basic intent of shutting down the regulation of these products. No question about it, the goal then was to shut down effective regulation of toxic chemicals.

MOYERS: Here is another document from inside the chemical industry. It is dated August 30, 1982. "Our work is prophylactic, not post-natal. We prevent rather than react. Standards prepared by the private sector will be used in more regulations, both federal and state. We had better be damn sure they say what we want them to say." So there was this growing sense that government was not going to be much help in finding out what was dangerous about chemicals.

MEYERHOFF: The term was "industry-assisted standards," and the chemical industry lawyers and lobbyists actually wrote the regulations and the standards for their own chemicals. They would draft the standard and then provide it to a friendly government official who would then adopt it in the federal register. There is clear documentation that the review of the data to determine whether a chemical was hazardous or not was being contracted out by the government to the very chemical companies who were making the products. They were entirely in bed with the chemical companies in those years.

MOYERS: There is another event that took place back then. Do you remember the explosion, the Union Carbide explosion in Bhopal, India? On one hand, it certainly increased public awareness and concern and fear, for very good reasons, about the hazards of these chemicals, and for a short period of time, there was a political response to that on Capitol Hill and elsewhere that we needed to bring about change, we needed to affect public policy in a different way on these very hazardous substances.

The best thing that came out of Bhopal were the so-called Bhopal Amendments to the Clean Air Act, now called the Toxic Release Inventory, and that is probably -- for toxic chemicals over the last 30 years at the federal level -- the only significant change in Federal law.

We did have a new pesticide law, but in terms of generic public policy and fundamental change on how we deal with these chemicals, the Toxic Release Inventory or the Bhopal Amendments were a big shift. They were a shift away from the idea of command and control, and government regulation by standard and preventing the use of particular hazardous products and putting a much greater emphasis on giving information to the public, making them aware of the risks, and letting either the marketplace or public pressure pressure industry to change their practices. And I think overall, that has been a great success.

MOYERS: You were one of those who conceived Proposition 65, were you not?

MEYERHOFF: Right.

MOYERS: Tell me about that.

MEYERHOFF: Proposition 65 is actually a very simple law. It was passed by initiative by a 2-to-1 majority of the people of California after--

MOYERS: By initiative, it means?

MEYERHOFF: Goes on the ballot and the public votes on it directly in California.

They voted for a law that is very simple. It says that for chemicals that are known to cause cancer or reproductive harm, if you expose me to that chemical and it presents a significant risk of cancer or reproductive harm or birth defects, you have to first provide me with a clear and reasonable warning.

You have to tell me if you are putting my health in jeopardy, and why. It is such a simple concept, but why it is so important and why it has had dramatic impacts in California is that it shifts the burden of proof. And what all the other pesticide and TSCA and the other federal laws all do, they put the burden on us.

The product comes on the market. It is usually untested. We then have to force the testing, which takes years. When we finally get the evidence that it causes cancer and health effects, the government then has the burden to take it off the market. That just ties things up in knots, and you have these chemicals for 20 or 30 or 50 years in some cases.

With Prop 65, if you are a manufacturer of a chemical and you are exposing my family to a health hazard in a consumer product, in the workplace, in the air and the water, you have to warn me, and that makes a big difference because the public then doesn't buy the product and it shifts the burden to the company.

MOYERS: You were really turning the system of regulation upside-down.

MEYERHOFF: It turned the entire system on its head, and that's why the chemical industry and agriculture and others in California fought the law so hard. In fact, for the first several years after the initiative passed by this massive majority, the governor then -- Governor Deukmejian, who was an opponent of the law- gutted the law.

He adopted regulations saying that it only applied to chemicals known to cause cancer in humans, not in animals. That wasn't the intent of the law. We have always tested animals and extrapolated from animal data. He said that it didn't apply to food, to drugs, to cosmetics in the workplace, and we brought a series of lawsuits which we called Deuk 1, Deuk 2, Deuk 3, and it fixed all of that. So the law is now in effect and working rather well in California.

Prop 65 put the fear of God in the chemical companies, and it had never been there before.

MOYERS: What did they do?

MEYERHOFF: Well, they first fought it in California and tried to get the politicians to tie it up. They also went to Congress and went to their friends in Congress and tried to get legislation put through that would pre-empt the statute, and we fought those battles over and over and were successful in preventing any kind of pre-emption. And they made sure that it never happened again. In any other state where there was even a hint of a law like this they just shut the whole thing down.

MOYERS: The documents from the industry show that industry organized a front group called Californians for a Balanced Future. It was an industry group, but it wasn't publicly identified with the chemical industry, and they needed some money. Here is the agenda of a meeting with the Manufacturing Association's Board of Directors, June 4, 1986, in West Virginia.

What they do is to agree to put their own money into this effort to oppose the initiative in California and other initiatives. It says "A campaign fund of $5 million has been targeted with a broad coalition of industry and agricultural interests having been formed to finance and manage the campaign. A total of $150,000 is needed by June 25 for fund-raising, research, and advertising, an additional $650,000 payable in July, August, or September."

MEYERHOFF: Well, I always knew there were resources against us. I actually was unaware of the amount, and that actually surprises me that there was quite that high level of dollars, and that was a lot of money then, to oppose Prop 65.

MOYERS: They got a late start, which means they didn't get as much money as they wanted.

MEYERHOFF: The problem that they had and why Prop 65 is such a powerful instrument is that there is almost no role for government in Proposition 65, and it was structured that way, because the point of access for these special interests is to tie up the politicians, tie up the government.

But if you take government out of the equation, you basically have a self-executing law. Tell the public, let them protect themselves. There is very little, even with mountains of money, that the industry can do to stop you. Overall the law has been a great success because it works--one court called it a "legislative battering ram," intended to simply cut through bureaucracy and cut through politicians and let the public protect themselves.

MOYERS: So they raised this money, but despite the fact that they did raise this money and had this group fighting Proposition 65, in November of 1986, the voters said "Yes" to Proposition 65. What were the voters saying?

MEYERHOFF: The voters were saying, in the preamble to the initiative, "We don't trust the government to protect us any longer from chemicals that cause cancer or birth effects or other harm. Give us the information, tell us when we are at risk, we will protect ourselves." That was the basic message.

And if you fail to do that, then you, a chemical company or growers or others, can be fined up to $5,000 per day, per person that isn't warned. Now, with a consumer product, millions of people, no warning, that has enormous pressure on the company, and it puts the pressure right where they live, in their wallet, and that tends to make change happen.

MOYERS: During the fight over Proposition 65, the industry made claims that the sky would fall, that businesses would have to close or be forced to leave the state. Did that happen?

MEYERHOFF: No, on the contrary, and it's pretty typical of industry -- big fear campaigns, you are going to shut down agriculture, food prices will sky-rocket. None of that happened.

In fact, I think most neutral observers would now agree that Prop 65 has been an enormous success. We have had a series of very successful enforcement cases. Both the public can bring cases and the Attorney General of California can bring cases.

The efforts by the industry in the Congress, in the courts, in the state legislature, with the politicians, to undermine the law, have all failed, not that they have t given up. They were back in Congress this year trying to pre-empt it once again, and we always have to watch them, depending on what happens in Washington.

But overall, they are now slowly accepting the law, and as a result of that, there are now several hundred chemicals on a list known to cause cancer or birth defects. What is interesting here is that for the first time, industry needs standards to be set. They need numbers.

In the past, what they have always done is tried to prevent the governments from saying how much lead is safe, how much toxaphene, because if there is no regulation, there is no regulation to enforce.

Under Prop 65, because of the burden shift, they need the safe level set because, otherwise, any level of the chemical in the product can require a warning and can put them in very serious financial jeopardy. So we now have hundreds of regulations, far more than were ever set at the federal level, saying what is a permissible level of a carcinogen or a reproductive toxin in your food, your water, your air.

MOYERS: If memory serves me right, some of the companies even took steps to remove carcinogens from their products after the passage of Proposition 65. Gillette was one, I think.

MEYERHOFF: Yes and no. There have been hundreds of successful cases. You have two kinds of conduct. You have conduct that doesn't require a lawsuit, where they simply reformulate. Gillette is a good example of that. There have also been a series of very successful enforcement actions where the federal government didn't act.

Bottled water is one example of that. Bottled water, about 60 to 70 percent of bottled water, on which Americans spend over $4 billion a year, isn't regulated by the federal government. Bottled water that is only made in an individual state and isn't sold across state lines isn't regulated by the federal government.

Seltzer water, carbonated water. There is a whole bunch of bottled water not regulated at all. Yet, because of the way it is manufactured, a good deal of bottled water contains arsenic at levels higher than the federal standard for arsenic in drinking water.

It contains triphenylmethanes. It contains other metals. There's a lot of hazardous substances that can get into bottled water. We brought a Proposition 65 case, very simple, that said if you are exposing me to arsenic in my bottled water at a level that can put my health in jeopardy, you have to put a warning on the bottle. Well, what bottled water company is going to put a warning on their bottle saying that this product contains a chemical known to cause birth defects? They would be out of business. They have reformulated the product.

MOYERS: Took the arsenic out?

MEYERHOFF: The company took the arsenic out. The public now is protected and the case was settled, and that was throughout the industry. We settled with Crystal Geyser, Calistoga, Evian. A whole number of bottled water companies now have cleaned up the product.

We sued over lead--lead is a very pernicious substance and lead has been a great success story in the United States. It is probably the single greatest toxic chemical success story in the last 50 years. When we took it out of gasoline, we dramatically reduced lead in the environment, but many American children still have elevated lead levels in their blood that can cause metal impairments.

So it is still a problem out there. One of the principal sources of lead now to the public is in drinking water. One of the major sources of the lead in the drinking water is that all of the components of your drinking water system, the faucets and the pipes and the water meters, drinking water fountains, the inner components are made from leaded brass, and the lead leaches from the brass into the water.

So, when you turn on your faucet and the water has been sitting there overnight, a substantial amount of lead has leached into the water and you are drinking that today. Again, the federal government has taken no action over the lead in your drinking water.

Litigation was brought against a manufacturer of faucets, lots of different kinds of faucets, and water meters, those devices in the front of your house, all filled with lead. That litigation was successful. All of those manufacturers are now coming up with unleaded brass. They are removing the lead from the brass.

MOYERS: And after Proposition 65, Dow Chemical and Sara Lee removed toxins from some of their products, and a line of canned goods even was cleaned up.

MEYERHOFF: There has always been a problem with lead in cans. There was wine. There were problems with lead in bottles of wine because the caps on top of the wine was lead. The cap itself was made out of lead. Prop 65 lawsuit was brought. Every bottle of wine now throughout the United States, those caps are gone.

Calcium products, antacids, that sort of thing that you buy, taken particularly by pregnant women, a very serious problem with lead, again, in the calcium because calcium comes from oyster shells. It comes from other sources, and the calcium was contaminated by levels of lead that presented a significant risk.

The FDA had taken no action for years, notwithstanding very serious complaints. The Attorney General of California brought a lawsuit. All of those products have now been reformulated, and the lead has been removed from calcium, sold, again, throughout the United States.

One thing that is important to understand here -- because California is such a major market, there is a dramatic ripple effect with consumer products. If they reformulate a product in California, it doesn't make sense most of the time to sell a hazardous product in another state and sell a clean one in California. Plus, it may open them up to product liability.

MOYERS: So, after the voters voted, the chemical companies, some of them, did the right thing.

MEYERHOFF: They fought first, and they fought and they fought, and then they finally started to clean up their act.

MOYERS: So the theory behind the law worked, at least in California?

MEYERHOFF: Yes, it worked. It's worked quite well.

MOYERS: One of the most surprising documents that we found buried in the industry's confidential files dates to this time. When they took on the right to know initiatives, they were arguing that there was no health data demonstrating the risk of chemicals. What they were not telling the public was that they also had no health data proving them safe.

MEYERHOFF: With chemicals, it's shoot first and ask questions later. For any other product, you would not put an airplane on the market and find out if it would crash. You wouldn't put an automobile on the market and find out if it would crash, although recent events indicate perhaps that does happen on occasion.

But with chemicals, it is put them out there, put them in our food, put them in our water, put them in the work place, put them in our air, and then later -- only if pressured -- test them to find out if they cause cancer or other kinds of adverse effects.

It is entirely upside-down. The pharmaceutical drugs, which are chemicals, of course, there is a very difficult screening and testing mechanism done first before they go on the market. With chemicals, there are pesticides that have been on the market for 50 years.

MOYERS: What this means is that the chemical industry has never bothered to conduct safety tests on the vast majority of those chemicals you said are out there.

MEYERHOFF: There are massive data gaps on both the toxicology -- what are the health effects -- and on the exposure side. It is not enough simply to test the chemicals and find out what harm they cause. We also need enormous amounts of data on where they are. Are they in the food? Are they in the bottled water? Are they in your air?

Ignorance isn't bliss in this context. It is dangerous, but it is in the interest of the chemical companies to keep us in the dark because so long as we don't know where we are being exposed or what the health effect is, they will make their profits and we'll take the risk.

MOYERS: Are you suggesting that in this whole process, chemicals were given more rights than consumers and ordinary people?

MEYERHOFF: Oh, far and away, the priority here was get the chemicals on the market, make as much money as we can, and the public be damned in most cases. In part, it was because you had a new technology with enormous promise early on.

I will give you a good example of that. It was here in New York on Long Island. There was a major infestation of nematodes, very tiny worms, that were threatening the potatoes. It was much like the Irish famine, the same kinds of potatoes. And the Congress passed something called the Golden Nematode Act which allowed on Long Island massive use of largely banned chemicals, chemicals like DDT and DBCP and others, just sort of aerial bombardment of Long Island, and many of those chemicals got into the drinking water supply.

And now there is significant suspicion that the reason for the breast cancer epidemic in Long Island may well have been from this massive use of those pesticides in those years, but that was at a time when no one really was very concerned about the health risk of toxic chemicals. I mean, you've seen photographs of children following DDT trucks down the street. It was just an enormous presumption of safety, and that was built into the law and it was built into the public policy, and then it was only in the '60s and the '70s that we began to wake up.

MOYERS: It takes a herculean effort, doesn't it, to get even one of these chemicals off the market?

MEYERHOFF: It takes extraordinary resources. It takes a herculean effort by the government, mainly because of the power on the other side, because it isn't a fair fight. You have not only their lawyers in a courtroom. Lawyers can fight lawyers, but you have their lobbyists on Capitol Hill that are trying to fix the system. You have government officials, even well intentioned, that are beaten down. There are mountains and mountains of paper they can't really deal with. You have thousands and thousands of chemicals, and you have a small budget. It is uphill to the extreme.

MOYERS: How did this process work in the case of TSCA, the Toxic Substances Conversation Act?

MEYERHOFF: It started out as a good idea. It was weakened and weakened in the Congress. Then, when it was finally adopted, it creates such discretion and so much flexibility in the chemical companies on whether even to conduct the testing -- much less to regulate a chemical -- that it has been probably the single least-effective environmental law.

The other fundamental question in laws like TSCA is, once you have the data and you want to ban a chemical, what is the standard? Is it a public health standard, or is it a cost-benefit standard? Some laws, the Clean Air Act, by way of example, is a public health standard. You take a look and see if there is a serious threat to public health, and if so, you can protect the public.

TSCA and FIFRA, the pesticide law, have a cost-benefit standard. So, after you know it causes cancer or birth defects, after you know there is a serious health hazard, some government official has to decide yes, but this is how much asparagus we can grow from it, this is how much it can help the plastic industry, this is how much it is useful in paint, and they balance that purported benefit against your health and they decide, and even that decision is then open to review by the courts.

MOYERS: How much of a role is played by the claim of trade secrets?

MEYERHOFF: Trade secrets are a very serious problem because it is usually a smokescreen. It is a way of stamping on information that could be incriminating to a company, a trade secret protection, to prevent it from going to the public, prevent it from going to the government, trying to keep it out of the courts.

We litigated a case in the US Supreme Court, Ruckelshaus v. Monsanto, where I sued EPA to get the basic health and safety data, the test data on a number of major pesticides, and the chemical company said that all of that data -- test data to tell us if they cause cancer or birth defects -- was trade secret and it was not available to the public. And we litigated it through the Supreme Court and won, but it is used as a major foil to keep the public out.

MOYERS: There was another initiative in California, a second initiative, called "Big Green," which attempted to expand the Right to Know Act that had already been passed by the voters.

MEYERHOFF: I remember it well.

MOYERS: What do you remember about it?

MEYERHOFF: Well, it was a very difficult campaign. It was a very ambitious initiative because it dealt with toxic chemicals and global warming and ozone depletion and redwoods and coastal protection. It was big.

It was a generic environmental statute that was put on the ballot at a time when public consciousness over the environment was at an all-time high. It was after the Exxon Valdez. Enormous amounts of money.

This time, the chemical companies and their friends were prepared. Enormous amounts of money were spent--10 to 1 were out-spent on the media, but really what changed there was that the politics changed. You had the Persian Gulf crisis and the recession occurred between when the measure went out on the ballot and the election, and it failed. But every initiative that year on the ballot failed. It was just a bad year.

MOYERS: Ohio had a right to know initiative, and the industry poured money in to defeat it. Then, in 1994, in Massachusetts, there was an effort on the part of citizens to pass an initiative that would have limited the amount of contributions that corporations can make to initiatives, to this kind of campaign, and the records show that industry poured money into that.

MEYERHOFF: To try to prevent that type of control on their spending of money.

MOYERS: Why would they get that involved in a campaign to do something about contributions?

MEYERHOFF: Well, because the industry fears democracy. I mean, it is their worst nightmare to be able to bypass the politicians and to bypass legislative bodies where they have such enormous power and go directly to the voters. I mean, that is their worst nightmare, and they will do everything in their not insubstantial power to prevent the public from having that right.

MOYERS: In fact, in one of the documents from the industry, you find these words that they were worried that, "Notwithstanding our success in the Big Green Campaign, activist groups will continue to use the ballot initiative to bypass the legislative process."

MEYERHOFF: Oh, and I think the opportunities are still there to go back to the ballot again in California and elsewhere. The more the industry succeeds in shutting down effective protection of public health, the more the public does become aware that they are not being protected, and I don't think Prop 65 was unique. I think we will see better and stronger environmental laws in the future from direct ballot measures.

MOYERS: But what this means is that the industry believed that it had a better chance to control the legislative process, to manipulate the politicians than they do the voters.

MEYERHOFF: You can buy politicians. It is harder to buy millions of voters, and you might be able to deceive them through paid television and the rest, but basic ideas still matter, and good ideas, if you can get them in front of the voters, will still be enacted into law.

MOYERS: What was your reaction when the chemical industry came out with this voluntary testing of chemicals? It even called this voluntary testing the Chemical Right to Know Program.

MEYERHOFF: There is a pattern here. It is a pattern of avoid, evade, delay, and when necessary co-opt, and I think this is an example of the co-option. There is enormous pressure now on the chemical companies to test their products, and there is legislation, including the Food Quality Protection Act, the new pesticide law, that passed a few years ago and President Clinton signed into law requiring massive testing of toxic chemicals.

How much, by what standards, who is going to oversee it is left in the hands of government officials, and what the chemical companies are now trying to do is sort of preempt that process, set up their own agenda over 20 years to do less testing than the law will actually require- so basically to cut their losses.

Having said that, I think we finally are seeing enormous test data coming into industry, coming into the government agencies, and so we are moving from a time when the question are what are the health effects, what is the gap? We are filling the gap now, and that raises the question, well, then what is the regulatory response? Government will no longer be able to say we don't know. Industry can no longer say we don't know because the data now will be there, but then will the system work at all? Will we protect the public health or not?

The best example of that probably is this increasing concern over endocrine disrupters, chemicals that are called estrogenic. It is not a new area of science, but it is a new area of concern.

And what these endocrine disrupters apparently do is they actually mimic the hormone in the body, and they get into the cell where the natural hormones should go and disrupt it, and in nature what we are finding are animals that are being--wildlife that are being born, male animals with female reproductive organs, very serious birth defects, other kinds of deformities. This concern about these chemicals causing breast cancer especially and other adverse effects.

So, under this new statute, the new law requires major testing of thousands and thousands of chemicals to determine are they endocrine disrupters, are they going to present this very serious health hazard? It looks like we are going to get a lot of that data now.

Over a billion dollars has been allocated for this testing. When we get all of that data, then the debate is going to shift to what do we do about it. And what I fear then, it will be a repeat of what happened in the '60s and the '70s. The concern was there, the public was there, and then the industry simply overwhelmed the system and shut down the government.

I would like to think that the right to know laws by themselves will resolve the matter. I don't think they will. I think they are part of what should be an overarching solution, but they are not the entire solution. Take lead and gasoline. It was command and control. It was the banning of that substance, not simply warning people about it in the era that ultimately protected millions and millions of people in this country.

What we need to do in the final analysis is streamline these laws, put the burden where it belongs, on the chemical companies, have well-intentioned government officials overseeing their implementation and protect the public health once and for all.

MOYERS: Industry is now saying, "We have got the message, we are going to voluntarily test these products, trust us." What is your response to that?

MEYERHOFF: I have never trusted the chemical companies, and I never will trust the chemical companies. They are driven by a profit motive. They are driven by a strategy of keep it on the market as long as possible, make as much as we possibly can, and deal with chemicals on a chemical-by-chemical basis, we have thousands of them, we will never lose if we do that.

I don't think there has been any significant shift in that approach. I think what they will try to do is co-opt the process. They will delay for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, getting these chemicals tested. They will bury the data if it is incriminating. They will oppose any kind of significant regulatory response. They will do what they have always done, which is to try to prevent public health from being protected.

MOYERS: Many people in this country believe that we have in place a system that will protect them and protect their children from toxic chemicals and hazardous materials. Are they wrong?

MEYERHOFF: I think they are essentially wrong. There is an illusion of safety that the Government is there protecting us, that there are very strong environmental health laws in play. We have had some successes. The air in some places is cleaner, particularly -- of some particular kinds of chemicals, but ambient toxic chemicals now are higher than they ever were.

The water in some places, surface water, is cleaner. The lead is out of the gasoline. It is not that the environmentalists haven't had some successes, but overall, I think the chemical companies have been winning.

MOYERS: Would it surprise you to know that the documents show that as far back as the first Bush administration in 1992, the chemical industry had been privately developing this idea of voluntary testing as a strategy to avoid regulation?

MEYERHOFF: I think the idea of a chemical company voluntarily testing its product is not unlike efforts to voluntarily regulate their products. It is an attempt to pre-empt effective Government. It is an attempt to try to cut their losses. That they have been doing this for 10 years, it doesn't really surprise me because they are always looking for strategies to reduce protection of the public health, to continue the products out there in the market as long as possible. It is simply a defense mechanism.

MOYERS: You said you don't trust the industry, you never will. Do you trust the government?

MEYERHOFF: I trust the government to try to do its job. There have been cases where we had government officials that had been corrupt or had been too close to the regulated industry, but in my experience -- and this is 30 years of experience -- you have some very hard- working, very committed people within EPA and OSHA and the Food and Drug Administration trying to do their jobs.

They are up against enormous opposition from people in the Congress and people in the regulated industry and the power of money. They get demoralized. They get beaten down. The scientists are always being attacked as being scare-mongers and that sort of thing. It is a very difficult job. I think, though, in the final analysis, we need government to protect us, and we need a stronger commitment by the Congress to these government agencies to let them fulfill their mandate.

MOYERS: Explain to me what you mean when you talk about the power of money.

MEYERHOFF: The power of money, it just permeates the legislative process, and it is the money culture in Washington, DC, where you have direct access to very powerful congressmen on the Hill that are on the appropriations committee that control an agency's budget, that are on--

MOYERS: You bought that access with campaign contributions?

MEYERHOFF: You bought it with millions of dollars of campaign access, and it gives you special access. It gives you unique access. It gives you secret access, and that access then translates to control of the executive branch of the administrative agencies. There's a good deal of attention paid to the power of money in Congress on legislation, but I think what people miss is that same power impacts the EPA and OSHA and FDA and other arms of the executive branch.

MOYERS: Because Congress can cut off--

MEYERHOFF: They have the purse strings.

MOYERS: They can cut off the budget of the EPA or OSHA or any of these public health agencies.

MEYERHOFF: That's right. So, if you have a friendly congressman that chairs a very powerful committee, it takes a unique government official to buck that system.

MOYERS: Is it worse today?

MEYERHOFF: Oh, I think the power of money in the Congress is far worse than anything I have ever seen in the last five to 10 years. It is exponentially worse in both parties.

MOYERS: Does this put the citizens' case for public health at a disadvantage?

MEYERHOFF: I think the public health is in greater jeopardy now because of the power of money than it has been in 20 years.