THE CONTRADICTIONS IN CURRENT PUBLIC POLICY

Individuals charged with the responsibility for regulating health and safety in the United States face an impossible task. On the one hand they are confronted with a naive public demand that all products be "safe." This view was nicely summarized by Roger Lane Carrick, an environmental lawyer who was one of the leading proponents of California's Proposition 65. In an interview with The New York Times, Carrick said,51

Do consumers have a right to walk into a store and know the products sold there are safe? Or do they have to be analytical chemists, reviewing the full list of chemicals and making their own informed choices? I think consumers have an expectation that the government won't let unsafe foods be sold . . . If it's not safe, it shouldn't be sold.

On the other hand, once the regulators gain even the skimpiest knowledge of science, they quickly learn that these demands are impossible. In particular, they are faced with the reality that

• There is no such thing as a safe lunch or a safe product -- everything we consume involves risk.

• There is no scientific definition of significant risk -- nothing in science tells us that a one-in-a-million chance of death is "insignificant" whereas a two-in-a-million chance is "significant."

• Our knowledge about the causation of cancer is highly uncertain, since we will not tolerate experiments on humans and high-dosage experiments with rodents provide us with questionable results -- everything is toxic at some dosage level, even non-chlorinated water.

• Were we to choose a risk level such as a one-in-a-million chance of death and outlaw all products and activities above that risk level, life as we know it would come to a grinding halt.

Faced with impossible and contradictory demands, regulators frequently respond to the safety fad of the moment as well as special interest pressures. The result is a byzantine maze of regulations, impossible to justify by any rational standard. The following are some of the bizarre outcomes of this regulatory process.

Bias: Death by Cancer is Worse than Death by Other Causes. As noted above, the spirit of Proposition 65 could lead to a ban on the use of chlorine in the production of milk. Yet if this were done, the death rate in California would surely rise because chlorine prevents other, more serious risks to health and safety. The bias in Proposition 65 is that death from cancer is worse than other causes of death. This same bias is reflected in the infamous Delaney Amendment to the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, which governs the behavior of the FDA. This amendment states that "no additive shall be deemed to be safe if it is found to induce cancer when ingested by man or animal." The amendment makes no provision for balancing the risk of cancer against other health risks, however.

Bias: Man-made Chemicals are Worse Than Natural Chemicals. In principle, the FDA has jurisdiction over all food products and their safety. Yet the Delaney Amendment applies only to food additives -- chemicals put in food by man -- and is silent on the agency's duties with respect to natural carcinogens. Thus,

• The FDA banned cyclamates in soft drinks and attempted to ban saccharin because both chemicals are mild carcinogens in rodents52

• At the same time, the FDA allows the sale of comfrey pepsin tablets in health food stores, although these tablets are at least 100 times more risky than saccharin in a soft drink because of their natural carcinogens.53

Bias: Popular Poisons Are Not As Bad As Unpopular Poisons. Just as federal regulatory agencies often follow newspaper headlines in their pursuit of chemical risks, they tend to tread cautiously where their actions would prohibit the public from buying and consuming popular products. Thus,

• While some government agencies measure carcinogens in parts per billion and parts per trillion in some products, people have no difficulty purchasing and consuming alcohol.

• Yet because of the natural carcinogen ethyl alcohol, a can of beer is 46 times more toxic and a glass of wine is 78 times more toxic than the saccharin in a diet cola.54

• The Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) has branded methylene chloride as a hazardous chemical and the FDA supports a ban on its use in hair sprays.

• Yet the FDA is trying not to ban the use of methylene chloride as a decaffeinating agent for coffee, probably under the assumption that the public's demand for decaffeinated coffee is about as strong as its desire for diet cola.

Bias: Special Interest Pressures Matter. In the absence of any clear guidelines on how health and safety regulations should be determined, small wonder that the influence of special interest groups is reflected in the regulations. How else can we explain the fact that:

• The EPA has banned EDB as a pesticide.

• Yet OSHA allows workers in certain industries to be exposed to EDB at a level of 40 percent greater than the comparable exposure level needed to produce cancer in one-half of the rodent population.

As it turns out, however, the required scrubbers are unreliable and often break down. During these periods, utility plants spew enormous quantities of sulfur oxides into the air. The result is more pollution, on the average, than would have occurred if utility companies could buy low-sulfur coal without scrubbers.56

As regulators act in response to the latest media blitz, or uninformed public outrage is directed at a specific chemical, no one should be surprised when the new regulations make the world less safe. Nor is this phenomenon confined to the regulation of pollutants and food additives.

Out of a concern for the environmental effects of fuel consumption, Congress has mandated Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards for U. S. automobile manufacturers. As a result, in 1989 U. S. automobiles must average 26.5 miles per gallon. However,57

• In order to comply with CAFE standards, auto makers are producing smaller cars, which are less safe for occupants when accidents occur.

• By one estimate, the 1989 standards alone will cause between 2,200 and 3,900 additional fatalities.

• Over the next decade, CAFE regulations may cause as many as 20,000 additional deaths.

The regulations of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are notorious for systematically depriving Americans of lifesaving drug therapies in the name of safety. In the latest episode,58

• The FDA, until recently, refused to allow the sale of TPA to treat heart attack victims, despite the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute's declaring TPA the drug of choice three years ago.

• This foot-dragging by the FDA is estimated to have cost as many as 30 lives per day.

• On the average, because of airline deregulation there are 66,000 fewer automobile accident injuries each year and 1,700 fewer deaths.

• Moreover, it is estimated that airline deregulation saves more lives each year on our highways than the total number of lives lost in domestic airline crashes in the last 12 years.

• As a result of the Clean Air Act, many local power plants were required to build smoke stacks 1,000 feet or more in height in order to disperse the pollutants. Now it turns out that this dispersal may contribute to acid rain.

• After banning EDB as a fumigant, the EPA approved the use of methyl bromide phosphine gas as an alternative. Yet phosphine and methyl bromide are both more poisonous than EDB and have contributed to far more worker accidents than EDB.

• Asbestos is virtually harmless as long as it remains on walls and is not flaking off and being dispersed as dust that can be inhaled. Yet asbestos removal programs make asbestos dust airborne and often create far more hazardous conditions than if it had been left alone.

• Because of safety fears, the use of whooping cough vaccine has dropped in a number of countries. This has resulted in outbreaks of the disease in Sweden, Britain, and Japan -- where a whooping cough epidemic killed at least 40 children.

• In the Silicon Valley, the semiconductor industry was required to place storage tanks for solvents underground as a safety measure in the 1960s. Yet this made it more difficult to detect leaks in the tanks, and solvent residues are now showing up in drinking water.

• In the early 1970s, the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) required that children's sleepwear be treated with the fire-retardant chemical TRIS. Later it was discovered that TRIS is highly mutagenic and possibly also carcinogenic.

Many more examples could be given. Of course not all safety regulations make us less safe. But all too frequently, regulators forbid one activity and insist on another with no knowledge of what the consequences will be. Small wonder, then, that these regulations often do more harm than good.

Regulation in the name of health, safety, and environmental protection also has made us less safe in another way: It has lowered productivity in the workplace and caused us to have less income.