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Poison! [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-04-04

As an amateur interested in the sciences in the 1950s I came in contact with a number of nasty poisons that were not regulated at the time. I wrote a diary on my chemistry experiments (See: www.dailykos.com/...), but even before then I was exposed to numerous dangerous chemicals, from those in cigarette smoke (my father smoked his entire life and he lived to be over 90!) to those in lead white paint and leaded gasoline. Also chlorinated hydrocarbons were everywhere until Rachel Carson blew the whistle on the consequences. I am certainly not alone in this, as the problem of these toxins in our societal environment affected everybody in my generation. Unfortunately it has not been solved, and has only grown more complicated to the present day, despite some of the worst poisons being banned.

By the time I was twenty I had been exposed, to one degree or another, to lead white paint (the manager of the motel where we stayed first in Yuma gave me a board and some lead white paint to play with and of course I got it all over me- I was only 5 years old), leaded gasoline, Parathion (a truck carrying the stuff turned over on Highway Eighty and we drove through the area soon after), Chlordane (out landlord use it liberally to kill ants), probably DDT, home insect spray (my mother used it constantly to kill roaches), Carbon Tetrachloride (I used it to kill insects for specimens), Formalin (in construction material and specimen preservation), plus a number of chemicals my friend Dick and I used in chemical experiments. Ernie, our early Yuma landlady’s brother, had given me a specimen of Uranium ore (he was a Uranium prospector) that was, as I found out a very hot mix of Carnotite and Pitchblende, which I kept in my closet for years, as I did a bottle of Mercury given to me by the same landlady’s son to help me build a barometer (a project I scrapped as my research caused me to realize how dangerous that project was!)! This got spilled much later, when I was living in Florida, and caused a mess that I had to clean up and that gave me nightmares because I could find no one to help! I reported the incident, but the city I was in had no way of cleaning up such spills, nor did the the university chemical stores. They told me that they had numerous Mercury spills that had settled into the foundation of the chemistry building, but the university had refused to buy them a vacuum that could clean the stuff up! I cleaned up what I could find and gave them the result which they processed back in to pure Mercury for use in the Chemistry Department. Later I discovered that Mercury contamination in Florida was a much bigger problem than my bottle of the stuff (See: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...)

A Volkswagen van nearly killed me and several other people when the battery (unfortunately placed in a compartment in the floor) started spewing acid fumes in the interior. Thus ended a particularly dismal trip with friends, who were visiting a business associate in the state prison in Florence, Arizona. They did not want to make the trip alone!

During my career I ran into even more poisons. I breathed in massive amounts of Formalin during my time as a TA in organismic biology labs, I accidently got a sniff of Cyanide from an old killing jar, I installed No Pest Strips in insect drawers at the Arthropod Museum and then replaced them with Naphthalene and later Paradichlorobenzene. Finally when one of my associates died from lung cancer after spending years breathing Naphthalene, I dropped using any chemicals and changed to the museum’s current policy of inspection and freezing of drawers, if Dermestids (beetles that eat dried specimens) were found.

I wasn’t safe in the field either, with Parathion still being used (I inadvertently entered a field that had been recently sprayed with the stuff!). I was exposure to some plots treated with scorched earth herbicides like Tordon, and my exposure to a citrus grove that had been treated with every chlorinated hydrocarbon known to man (mentioned in my diary on biocides! (See: www.dailykos.com/...) Although I don’t think I was ever exposed to it, Monocrotophos (another deadly organophosphate like Parathion) was and is still used in crops. One of my colleagues said the it kills insects, birds, dogs, cats, small children and just about any non-plant in an sprayed area!

Since leaving the university I still cannot get free from toxins. Coal dust from uncovered coal trains that pass through my city is a worry, there are microplastics everywhere (yes, they are considered toxic), and even my favorite dark chocolate may be laced with Lead and Cadmium (See: www.asyousow.org/...). We are very busily poisoning ourselves and our environment. All for the love of money!

It is a wonder that in my eighties, I am still alive! Perhaps this is genetic as my father seemed indestructible, but it could be just dumb luck. Some of this peril is obviously my own fault (it took me years to realize the real dangers of some materials that were in common use- a result of the idiot idea I had acquired as a kid by reasoning that grownup must know what they were doing!), but much is simply the result of our society and how its technology has added new and old toxins to our everyday lives. This will likely be a factor in the possibility we will become extinct within the next thousand years or so, or even sooner, or we could live for the average million years for a mammalian species if we are very lucky (See: en.wikipedia.org/… and www.scientificamerican.com/...). Along with overpopulation, incompetent governments, nuclear war, failing potable water supplies, desertification, and habitat destruction, we certainly have a good chance of biting the dust without specific poisons. However, the continued addition of toxins and greenhouse gasses (they don’t poison us but, we can’t breathe them and they heat up the planet) into our environment is not negligible and may well be nails in the coffin. We’ve dumped the garbage out the back door way too often! I wish with my whole being that I could be more optimistic, but with the crowd we have running our own and several other major countries, it is really hard! Death by stupidity before our allotted time is over!

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/4/4/2312790/-Poison?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web

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