The Poison Papers

  

The Poison Papers

The original Poison Papers collection comprises thousands of documents obtained from federal agencies and chemical manufacturers through open records requests and public interest litigation. This trove is the product of more than four decades of work by Carol Van Strum, whose investigation uncovered hundreds of thousands of pages of fraudulent studies and falsified data used by the chemical industry—and often accepted by government regulators—to approve hazardous chemical products, particularly in sectors such as industrial logging.

Carol Van Strum, Diane Hebert, Eric Coppolino, and Peter von Stackelberg served as the primary custodians of the collection, responsible for gathering, preserving, scanning, and sharing the documents. Their collective goal was to make this critical information accessible to all who might need it.

Digitization of the collection was coordinated by The Bioscience Resource Project, with funding provided by The Bioscience Resource Project, the Center for Media and Democracy and the Park Foundation.

In 2018, the UCSF Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment (PHRE) helped the Industry Documents Library obtain a subset of the Poison Papers through the Bioscience Resource Project. This batch of 4,700 documents includes:

• internal scientific studies
• study summaries
• memos
• reports
• meeting minutes
• strategic discussions
• sworn testimonies
• planning documents collected in the course of litigation

The chemicals most prevalent in the documents include herbicides and pesticides (such as 2,4-D, Dicamba, Permethrin, Atrazine, and Agent Orange), as well as dioxins and PCBs. The documents come from key regulatory agencies, including the EPA, US Forest Service, FDA, Veterans Administration, and the Department of Defense. They also reference major chemical manufacturers such as Dow, Monsanto, DuPont, and Union Carbide, alongside numerous smaller manufacturers and the commercial testing firms that worked with them.

Special thanks to the UCSF Library Access Services staff, who provided valuable assistance in processing this collection.

Related Resources

• The Poison Papers from the Bioscience Resource Project.
• 100,000 Pages of Chemical Industry Secrets Gathered Dust in an Oregon Barn for Decades - Until Now, Sharon Lerner, The Intercept, 26 July 2017.