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A Prescription For 'Brain Gain'?
TERRY GROSS, host:
This is FRESH AIR. Iâm Terry Gross.
It just keeps getting harder to keep up with the amount of information that we
have to absorb and produce. Caffeinated coffee is a popular pick-me-up, but
lately a growing number of students and working people have been using
prescription drugs to help stimulate their focus and concentration, drugs that
werenât intended to do this and that arenât prescribed for this purpose, drugs
that are prescribed for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Narcolepsy
and Alzheimer's disease.
Their off-label use as neuro-enhancers raises many ethical, as well as medical,
questions. My guest, Margaret Talbot, examines those questions in her article,
âBrain Gain,â published in the current edition of The New Yorker. Talbot is a
staff writer for the magazine.
She says people who take neuro-enhancing drugs are using them like steroids for
the brain, hoping for a brain boost, a cognitive edge. Margaret Talbot, welcome
to FRESH AIR.
One neurologist who you spoke to coined the term cosmetic neurology, using
drugs developed for serious mental deficits to improve ordinary cognitive
function, an interesting term. What are some of the drugs that fit in this
category, and what are they typically prescribed for?
Ms. MARGARET TALBOT (Staff Writer, The New Yorker): Yes, I love that term, and
I think itâs quite descriptive of the phenomenon. The main drugs I would say
that are being used this way now are the drugs Adderall and Ritalin, which are
stimulants that are used widely to treat ADHD in children.
GROSS: Which is Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
Ms. TALBOT: Exactly. And the other one is a newer drug that I think perhaps
fewer people may have heard of. The brand name is Provigil; the generic is
Modafinil. And itâs a drug that was developed to treat the sleeping disorder
narcolepsy and came out with approval for that use in 1998.
The stipulated uses have expanded a bit. So now it can, itâs stated on the
label, be used for the kind of excessive daytime sleepiness that might be
associated with shift work, people who work nights, or sleep apnea.
But off-label and kind of ad hoc, people have been taking it to improve their
focus, promote wakefulness, and they think give them an edge, a mental edge.
GROSS: Apparently, a lot of students on college campuses are using these neuro-
enhancers now. You spoke to somebody whoâs used a lot of them who did want his
real name used, but tell us what he had to tell you about how he used them and
how he thought they helped him.
Ms. TALBOT: Yes. Well, this was a student who had graduated from Harvard
recently. In the piece, I call him Alex. He had been one of these really busy
kind of over-committed people. He had a lot of extracurriculars. He ran a big
student organization. He wrote a lot of research papers, about 12 a semester,
and he wanted to have some fun, as well.
He told me, you know, he didnât want to completely miss out on his youth. So he
felt that basically he had this impossible life. He was so over-scheduled, and
yet he didnât want to give any of it up, and he wanted to get good grades, and
so he started taking Adderall.
He got a doctor to prescribe it for him. He was familiar with the symptoms of
ADHD because he had a brother who had been diagnosed with it, and he basically
would take it pretty regularly, but in order to power through the papers he had
to write, go to all the meetings he wanted to go to and do as well as he
thought he should be doing in college without giving anything up.
GROSS: Now, I mean college students for years have drunk cups and cups and cups
of coffee or taken caffeine pills like No-Doze. Whatâs the difference between
taking these, you know, new drugs like Ritalin versus taking either, you know,
old-school amphetamines or, you know, caffeine?
Ms. TALBOT: I think whatâs different about this is - first of all, they are
prescription medications that people are taking often without a doctorâs
prescription or approval.
Oftentimes on college campuses, people are getting friends who have
prescriptions because they have a diagnosis of ADHD to sell them the drugs or
give them the drugs. So theyâre taking them without a doctorâs supervision, and
thatâs significant because I think people - a lot of college students in
particular, tend to think of these drugs are really benign because theyâve
grown up with so many people who had the ADHD diagnosis, so many schoolmates
who were taking the drugs that they tend to think of them as not something you
need to worry about really.
But they do have side effects, and particularly if you are taking them without
knowledge of somebody who knows your medical history, because theyâre
stimulants, they have the kinds of effects you might guess stimulants would
have, the kind of unwanted effects as well as the kind of desired effects:
difficulty going to sleep when you want to go to sleep, loss of appetite,
headaches, sometimes unexpected spikes in blood pressure.
I think for older people especially, they can also carry a risk of various
cardiac problems. And also, they carry a risk of dependence, as well, according
to the FDA labeling on them.
GROSS: Do we know what Ritalin or Provigil, two of the drugs that are being
used now as neuro-enhancers, what they do to the brain to increase the focus or
give you more mental energy?
Ms. TALBOT: Itâs interesting. Provigil, which they call an atypical stimulant,
they really donât understand the mechanism by which it works. It may increase
dopamine levels. It may have a number of effects, sort of global effects on the
brain that we donât really understand.
A little bit more is known about the mechanisms of the stimulants that have
been around longer, like Adderall and Ritalin, but I think that a lot of
neurologists will tell you we donât really know the long-term impacts of some
of these drugs. And interestingly, some of the neurologists I talked to said,
you know, there are physical side effects to be concerned about, but you could
also talk about cognitive side effects.
Usually, you donât improve one aspect of thinking without taking some kind of
potential toll on another. So there are a couple of researchers, for example I
talked to at U Penn - Anjan Chatterjee and Martha Farah - who are looking at
what impact these drugs might have on creativity, creative thinking.
They seem to, in laboratory tests, help on tasks that require focus, that
require really bearing down on something, and in certain kinds of tests like
remembering a string of numbers forwards and backwards and that kind of thing,
they do show a real benefit. But would that kind of focus actually have a
dampening effect on creativity?
I think all of us have had the experience of getting a great idea when weâre
not, in fact, hyper-focused on something but when weâre out, you know, walking
the dog or in the shower, and so that kind of thinking doesnât seem to be aided
by these new cognitive enhancers.
GROSS: Well, we mentioned that a lot of students, college students, are using
these drugs to help them focus on their work, their term papers. Thereâs other
people who you talked to who have found it useful in what theyâre doing, for
instance a champion poker player.
Ms. TALBOT: Thatâs right, yes. His name is Paul Phillips, and I came across him
because heâs actually written about the benefits he thought he got from taking
Provigil before he went out on the World Poker Tournament circuit, and he feels
that it really helped him to focus and to take in a lot of information about
the other players without feeling overwhelmed or over-stimulated, and he really
felt that it increased his earnings.
GROSS: You know, although neuro-enhancers have been called, like, brain
steroids, and compared to what steroids do for athletes, they are not banned,
for instance, from poker competitions.
Ms. TALBOT: Thatâs right. Theyâre not banned, and so anybody can take them, and
I think people are fairly open about taking them in those situations. And you
know, many people say they are akin to steroids, and you know, thatâs another
issue, whether â an ethical issue thatâs raised by these I think, which is
whether they constitute a form of cheating.
I think on college campuses, where you do hear a lot about these drugs, there
is some discussion, especially among students and especially among students who
arenât taking them, about whether this is fair. You know, if you are going into
an exam â because for example, the student that I talked to, one of the kinds
of purposes he used it for was, you know, before he went in to take an exam, he
would pop an Adderall.
So I think some students wonder, well is that really fair if other people
arenât getting that advantage, and should you have to report that youâre taking
the drug?
GROSS: Particular if youâre being graded on a curve.
Ms. TALBOT: Particularly if youâre being graded on a curve. Now, itâs a little
hard to imagine how that would work. I canât imagine really, you know, some of
our students in our finer institutions having to pee into a cup before theyâre
given their blue books, but you know, I think it is a legitimate question to
raise.
GROSS: Now another use that you mention in your article is that you say the Air
Force distributes one of these neuro-enhancers, Modafinil, to pilots on long
missions.
Ms. TALBOT: Thatâs right. The Department of Defense actually in general was one
of the first kind of entities in society to take an interest in Modafinil when
it became available and started testing it on pilots who go on long missions
and funded a lot of the early research on it.
And now the Air Force makes Modafinil available to them, and that raises and
interesting question, I think, which is will this be something that employers
will be inclined to hand out? It may be tempting for employers in the future.
GROSS: To suggest that perhaps your performance will be enhanced with these
drugs.
Ms. TALBOT: Exactly, exactly, and that you will be able to be much more
productive and working long hours. I mean after all, thatâs kind of a direction
weâre going in in society anyway.
GROSS: In a way, your employer doesnât even need to encourage you if youâre
competing with other people in the workplace for a promotion or just to keep
your job. You might feel the need to do that to keep or to get a competitive
edge.
Ms. TALBOT: Well thatâs right. I think thatâs actually a real issue because
there are subtle forms of coercion that I think we all feel. Actually, when the
scientific journal Nature did an informal poll of its readers last year, asking
whether they took drugs like this at grant times or under deadline pressure and
so on.
Most of the readers were presumably scientists or academics. They got 1,400
responses, and one out of five of the people said that they did take the drugs
like Provigil and Adderall and Ritalin for sort of cosmetic-neurology purposes,
if you will, and interesting, a third of the people who were polled said that
if they knew that parents at their childrenâs school were giving their children
these drugs not for a medical diagnosis but just to give them an extra edge,
that these people would feel also pressure to give their own kids, even though
they didnât really believe in it. And a third of the people who responded to
this poll said that they would feel that kind of pressure.
And then there is just the more â the feeling that I get as I was reporting
this story, for example. I would mention, you know, to colleagues that I was
doing it, and kind of a surprising, you know, number of people said oh yeah.
Iâve taken Provigil.
I take it for deadlines, and then I, you know, I donât actually use these
drugs, but part of me was thinking gosh, am I â is this why this person is so
much more productive? Is this why, you know, Iâm so behind on my deadlines? And
you do feel that maybe youâre not quite keeping up, and I think thereâs a lot
of that pressure in our society today anyway to work longer hours and be more
productive, and this is just another agent in that trend, I think, thatâs
important to look at.
GROSS: My guest is Margaret Talbot. Sheâs a staff writer for The New Yorker,
and in the current edition, she has an article called âBrain Gain: The
Underground World of Neuro-enhancing Drugs.â And weâll talk more about these
drugs after we take a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(Soundbite of music)
GROSS: If youâre just joining us, weâre talking about new neuro-enhancing
drugs. These are drugs that were created for other purposes, like Attention
Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, drugs like Ritalin and Adderall that are now
being used by a lot of people to increase their focus and productivity, either
students or people on the job, pilots, things along those lines.
And my guest, Margaret Talbot, is the author of the piece âBrain Gain: The
Underground World of Neuro-enhancing Drugs,â which is published in the current
edition of The New Yorker. Weâve talked about why some people feel that they
benefit from taking these neuro-enhancing drugs, but from the research youâve
done, do they have, like, an equal benefit for everyone, or are only certain
people more likely to feel a benefit from drugs like this?
Ms. TALBOT: Individually, I think some people probably, you know, get some
placebo effect if they believe in this strongly. Also, in the research thatâs
been done, and there is some data on these drugs in healthy, you know, non-
mentally-impaired people, where people are given a dose of, say, Provigil and
then asked to perform certain kinds of laboratory tasks that test focus and
memory, and in general they do show an improvement, not across the board, but
they show an improvement for most tasks in the studies that have been done.
However, they seem to show, interestingly, that they help people more who are
kind of in the middle range of intellectual ability than people are at the
higher range, which is kind of surprising, I think.
It seems like you might expect it to make smart people smarter, and I think
what it seems to suggest is maybe thereâs kind of a ceiling. If you do quite
well at a given memory test, say, already, thereâs only so much room for
improvement, and that may have some real-world applications, too, that these
drugs may help people go from kind of the mid-range or high-mid-range a little
higher in their capacity to do various kinds of jobs and not really help people
at the highest end.
GROSS: Now, youâve talked about some of the drugs that are being used as neuro-
enhancers to increase focus and productivity, and thereâs another class of
drugs that are being used or look like they might be on the verge of being used
this way, and these are drugs that were originally created for things like
Alzheimer's disease, for memory impairment. Can you talk about those drugs?
Ms. TALBOT: Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the things thatâs interesting
about this is this kind of neuro-pharmaceutical area is really booming because
we have an aging population and people who are working longer or want to be
able to work longer, and we also have, obviously, the Alzheimer's problem and
the memory impairments that come with that.
So there are a number of drugs in development that work on various receptors in
the brain, many of them with the aim of treating Alzheimer's patients, some
with the aim of treating other kinds of cognitive impairments that are
associated with mental illnesses like schizophrenia.
Thatâs the purpose of these drugs. You know, some of them eventually may also
trickle down into the kind of uses Iâm talking about here, where people are
getting a hold of them one way or another and taking them to give themselves a
positive boost when they donât have a recognized impairment or diagnosis. And
some of them, eventually, the uses may be expanded for them, too, and what we
consider to be unacceptable cognitive decline may also change, you know.
The kind of memory loss that a lot of people accept, mild memory loss that a
lot of people accept with middle age now, people may no longer feel is
acceptable and may be willing to take a drug that helps with that in the
future. So I think that may be a direction weâre moving in.
GROSS: One person who you quote in your article who supports the use of these
neuro-enhancers says why would you want an upward limit on the intellectual
capabilities of a human being? And you know, thatâs a pretty convincing way of
putting it.
On the other hand, one of the things I worry about is that if thereâs this
cosmetic neurology that starts happening, it risks creating a new normal in the
way that cosmetic surgery creates a new normal.
Suddenly, like, thereâs so many people who never have wrinkles. So itâs no
longer normal to have wrinkles as you get older. Itâs normal to be wrinkle-free
in a lot of circles, and you know, if you donât do that, youâre the one who
looks abnormal.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. TALBOT: Right. I think that the argument you cite by the person who says
why would you want an upper limit on, you know, intellectual capabilities is
something to keep in mind, and I think youâre hearing it, including from
scientists and neurologists who work in this area, and you know, their argument
is well, this even has some trickle-down benefits for society if people who are
very smart and are working on cures for diseases and so on, if they are smarter
and more productive, then that will benefit all of us.
The British Medical Association came out with a report where, among other
arguments, they made that argument. They said, you know, generally making
people smarter is considered a good thing. So you know, why would we not want
that?
Thereâs also, I guess, the social-inequality argument, which is that this is
the kind of thing, like so many benefits, that accrue to people at the upper
ends of the economic ladder. You know, that this is - the kind of people who
will get access to these drugs, who will have the savvy to go to a doctor and
describe the kind of symptoms - who will know about them, whose parents will
know about them - are also the kind of people who already, you know, are
getting extra help in the form of SAT tutoring or whatever it is and who
already are going to the best schools or whose parents can afford to send them
to the best schools. So that it â you know, thereâs an argument that it could
compound social inequalities that are already, at least, somewhat concerned
about.
GROSS: One study that you cite in your New Yorker article says that itâs
predominately white males going to Northeast colleges who are members of
fraternities who use these neuro-enhancing drugs. Whatâs the interpretation of
that?
Ms. TALBOT: Well, the authors of the study are fairly careful not to
extrapolate too much from it, but I think itâs an interesting, suggestive
finding.
You know, you can imagine that college campuses that are more competitive and
have, you know, higher standards to get in, and where people a fair amount of
academic pressure to keep up, you know, would be more likely to be laboratories
of this kind of experimentation.
I mean on this point, Iâm just guessing, but fraternities I would imagine would
be places where people could trade them amongst themselves with greater ease.
One of the things that was interesting to me is trying to look a little bit at
how people get these drugs on campus, and there are these Web sites called
BoredAt, where students who are in their libraries at their various
institutions and ostensibly studying are sort of sending notes to one another
on this computer board. And a lot of them - I mean, itâs quite common to find
on there queries about buying or selling or trading Adderall and Ritalin. And
some of the universities where I looked at these sites were some of the leading
Ivy League institutions.
And so I think that academic pressure and academic competitiveness is one of
the forces contributing to the use of these drugs.
GROSS: Margaret Talbot, thank you so much for talking with us.
Ms. TALBOT: Thank you.
GROSS: Margaret Talbot is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her article,
âBrain Gain: The Underground World of Neuro-enhancing Drugs,â is published in
the current edition. Iâm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
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Navigating America's 'Poisoned Waters'
TERRY GROSS, host:
This is FRESH AIR. Iâm Terry Gross. Should we be concerned that scientists are
finding six-legged frogs and male fish with ovaries in the Potomac River and
Chesapeake Bay? Journalist Hedrick Smith thinks so. He says limitations
affecting aquatic life in those waters may be connected to chemicals seeping
into rivers and lakes around the country that are the sources of much of our
drinking water.
And these chemicals poisoning our water arenât just coming from industrial
plants. Theyâre coming from agriculture, suburban development, and from our
cars and chemicals and the products we use every day, like cleansers and
toothpaste. Hedrick Smith is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who is senior
producer and correspondent for âPoisoned Waters,â a Frontline documentary which
premieres tomorrow night on public television. In 18 months of research, Smith
says heâs found the nationâs water resources face threats which are very
different from those which prompted the passage of the Clean Water Act, but no
less troubling. Hedrick Smith spoke to FRESH AIR contributor Dave Davies.
DAVE DAVIES: Well, Hedrick Smith, welcome back to FRESH AIR. This story begins
in Chesapeake Bay. Describe this body of water and its ecological significance
for us.
Mr. HEDRICK SMITH (Journalist): Well, I will, Dave, but just let me say for a
moment that Iâve had a house on the Chesapeake Bay for 30 years. Iâm a sailor.
Iâm a crabber, not a very good fisherman. Iâm a swimmer. Iâm a hiker. I love
the bay. I love the water. So this is a â an environmental story but itâs also
a story of some personal significance to me, reported here and on Puget Sound.
Both bodies of water are bodies I know personally. And I think part of that is
whatâs important about these bodies of water.
They are grate areas of recreation and of importance to the people of many
regions, Chesapeake Bay serving six states. These grate coastal estuaries like
the Chesapeake Bay are marvelous environmental laboratories because their
environment is so rich with marine life, with all kinds of topography, and
scientists love to study them. And weâve been studying it for a long time.
Being closed to the nationâs capital, it was one of the areas which the
Environmental Protection Agency under Bill Ruckelshaus, who has served both
President Nixon and President Reagan, singled out for particular attention,
trying to gather the six states together to set goals and dramatically reduce
the â the pollution that was so palpable in peopleâs faces back in the 1970s,
so bad that if you put your hand in the water in some places, itâd come out
with green algae on it.
This Chesapeake Bay became one of the places that was afflicted but also one of
the places where the government focused itâs efforts. And so taking a look at
the Chesapeake Bay today is a way of taking the thermometer and applying it to
Americaâs waterways generally from coast to coast.
DAVIES: How do we know the bay is in trouble today?
Mr. SMITH: Well, there are any number of indicators - one of them is that today
the oysters are down to two percent, the crabs are about 50 percent of what
theyâre just 25 years ago. You have dead zones that now occupy about 40 percent
of the main stem of the Chesapeake Bay in the heat of summertime and dead zones
are places like the face of the moon, although theyâre under water. Theyâre so
barren that absolutely nothing can live in them. And they kill fish, crabs,
wildlife.
Thereâre are no grasses down there in which â in which all the marine life
needs to grow. And thatâs all been caused by human pollution, by runoff with
phosphorous and nitrogen in it that creates algae, that when it dies sinks to
the bottom and sucks all the oxygen out of the water and even fish and all
these other wildlife creatures, aquatic creatures need oxygen in the same way
people do.
DAVIES: Now, as you described a moment ago, in the 1970s there was national
outrage at this extremely visible kind of water pollution - the Cuyahoga River
in Cleveland catching fire and Lake Erie appearing, you know, all but dead, and
that of course prompted Congress to act and enact the Clean Water Act.
How is the water pollution that the nation confronted then different the from
kinds of threats to places like the Chesapeake Bay another â other bodies of
water today?
Mr. SMITH: Well, in the old days pollution came basically from large
installations - industry or wastewater treatment plants came out of a pipe. It
was known as point source pollution. You could see right where it came from.
The modern pollution is much more dispersed. Itâs much more spread out. Whether
itâs agriculture pollution because of animal manure or fertilizers used on
farms or these industrial scale chicken and hog and cattle growing operations,
which basically arenât regulated by the Clean Water Act, or itâs the storm
water runoff from our roads and our developments and our suburbs, which have
all kinds of chemicals in them that come from all kinds of products in our
lives. So itâs a very different kind. The new pollution is a very kind of
pollution and much harder to get a handle on than the old pollution in the old
industrial days.
DAVIES: All right, itâs a very different regulatory challenge when you have a
pipe to an industrial polluter. Let â letâs talk about agricultural pollution
as a piece of this. Now, there have been stories about dead zones in the Gulf
of Mexico from all of the agricultural runoff that goes down the Mississippi
River. In Chesapeake Bay, which as you said is a sort of a good laboratory for
examining these issues, youâve got the issue of industrial scale chicken
farming in the Delmarva Peninsula, which is Delaware and Maryland and Virginia.
How is chicken farming different there now than it used to be and whatâs its
ecological impact?
Mr. SMITH: Well, essentially itâs done what almost everything else is done in
the American economy; itâs grown to scale. Itâs mass production now. It used to
be family farms and family farms used to mean people who raised hundreds or
maybe a few thousand chickens. Now there are a couple of million chickens
raised on a family farm, but itâs now an industry. Fly over it and itâs six or
seven sheds each with 40,000 or 50,000 chickens in them at any one time and the
growing season has been shortened.
And the result is you have this enormous concentration of chicken manure.
Youâve got concentrated growing of chicken, which is efficient, and youâve got
a concentrated growing of manure, which is very troublesome. Just one figure
that will capture it. There were 570 million chickens grown on the eastern
shore of the Delmarva Peninsula last year and they produced 1.5 billion pounds
of chicken manure, and thatâs more manure than the human manure from the cities
of New York, Washington, San Francisco, and Atlanta all put together.
And the human manure gets processed by wastewater treatment plants. The chicken
manure doesnât. So a lot of it when it rains, itâs out on the fields, itâs just
left in piles, rain hits, washes the manure into the â into the waterways, and
youâve got E-coli bacteria, but youâve also got phosphorous and nitrogen, which
create the algae that creates the dead zone. So thereâs a direct connection
between the dying of the bay and this large unregulated animal manure problem.
DAVIES: And of course thereâs a connection to our lifestyles. We love getting,
you know, low-priced food and inexpensive chickens. And there are big companies
that process them - Tyson and Perdue. They donât own the chicken farm. They buy
the chickens from the chicken farmers. Who is responsible forâ¦
Mr. SMITH: Wellâ¦
DAVIES: Well, yeah, whatâs the relationship? Whoâs responsibleâ¦
Mr. SMITH: Well, actually itâs very â very interesting. Chicken growing in
America has now become kind of tenant farming. Itâs modern tenant farming on a
very large scale. It used to be that the chicken growers - the farmers own the
chickens and then they sold them after they grew them to the processors,
theyâre called the integrators - the Perdueâs, the Tysons. Actually, now whatâs
going on is that â the chicken integrators own everything. They own little baby
chicks, which they deliver to the chicken growers and then pick them up seven
or eight weeks later as grown chickens.
They provide the feed. They provide all the medicine to the biology to take
care of the chickens. They regularly supervise the chicken growers. They go by
there every week or so, make sure the temperature inside the chicken house is
right. I mean itâs really run as though this were Japanese (unintelligible).
Thereâs the big company at the top and these are the little guys at the bottom
and they salute and follow the orders of the people at the top.
But the amazing thing is the big chicken integrators own everything except the
manure or if chickens die while the farmers are growing baby chicks, they donât
own the dead chickens. In other words, they own all the good stuff and donât
know own any of the bad stuff
DAVIES: And when you say chicken integrators, you mean these big companies like
Tyson and Perdue, right?
Mr. SMITH: Thatâs what I mean. They integrate the whole process, thatâs why
theyâre called the chicken integrator.
DAVIES: So they donât take responsibility for disposal of the manure and
farmers leave - it runs off their farms into streams and into the bay.
Mr. SMITH: Well, the argument was, and there was some logic to it historically,
that farmers who raised chickens and also grew corn or soybeans or whatever,
they needed the manure from the chickens to fertilize their fields and it was a
good deal. And so long as you did this as a fairly small scale, it was a
reasonable balance between the amount of manure produced and the amount of
manure that was needed. But when you went to industrial scale with multibillion
dollar companies, it went off the charts.
It was just way, way, way too much manure for the local farmers to be able to
absorb, and maybe there are other places in the country - golf courses, Augusta
National, whatever, across the country, that need chicken manure, but no farmer
can afford to ship it down there. So it gets left right on the â on the
Delmarva Peninsula. And farmers often didnât even have sheds to store it. And
so it sat out in the fields and when the rain came it just washed the manure
down into the waterways.
Now there are regulations sort of saying you got to create sheds and â and put
it under sheds, but then thereâs a question as to whether or not either the
Federal government or state government has enough inspectors to check on this.
I think with the cattle farms in Pennsylvania thereâs something like one or two
inspectors for 13, 14 counties. They donât get around to see very much whether
or not the manure is properly cared for.
DAVIES: Now, just to be clear. There are technological solutions to this if
regulators will adopt them?
Mr. SMITH: Well, there are of a variety of solutions to this. I mean, one thing
is Perdue has pioneered making pellets - taking the manure, taking it to a
processing plants, squeezing all the water out of it, drying it, and then
making it granular and then somehow finding ways to ship it. I mentioned a few
moments ago golf courses across the country. There are golf courses and other
places around the country that do need manure, if it can be packaged,
fertilizer; they need it, theyâll take it.
But thatâs all, thatâs only about 10 percent of the excess manure. Another
thing to do is to ship it to other areas by truck. There are some people who
think that there maybe technology which will be able to convert manure into
energy that you can eventually make power plants out of it now. How youâre
going to do that without polluting the air and turning around and then have it
pollute the water again and stink up the whole place is not yet clear. The
technological answers havenât come through, but there are people who are
talking about that as one of the ultimate solutions, but weâre â weâre quite a
ways away from that.
DAVIES: Hedrick Smith is senior producer and correspondent for the new
frontline documentary âPoisoned Waters.â Weâll talk more after a break. This is
FRESH AIR.
(Soundbite of music)
DAVIES: If youâre just joining us, our guest is Hedrick Smith. He is a Pulitzer
Prize-winning journalist. He is also the senior producer and correspondent for
the upcoming frontline episode âPoisoned Waters.â I wanted to talk about some
of the â the new chemicals that are appearing in waterways, and this is
dramatically illustrated in the documentary by some of the aquatic life in the
Potomac River. What are you seeing with some these animals?
Mr. SMITH: Well, part of what happened was some years ago the people in charge
of the fish and game commissions in Virginia and West Virginia began noticing
unusual fish kills in the upper Potomac, the Shenandoah River, and they
couldnât explain them. There would be hundreds of fish found floating belly up,
and so they called in the U.S. Geological Survey and some other scientists to
try to figure out what was going on. And they began to find not only fish kills
but they began to find abnormalities in the fish, one problem called inter-sex,
which is female eggs in the male gonads of small mouth bass. Thatâs a very
alarming thing.
I mean elsewhere in the country theyâve found alligators with small penises,
theyâve found frogs with six legs, theyâve found mutations that are, when you
stop to think about them, are really horrible. If they happened to human
beings, people would be up in arms, and these are warnings, the scientists now
believe, about whatâs in these waters.
DAVIES: So what do they think might be causing this?
Mr. SMITH: Well, these are apparently chemicals that are in many, many modern
products of our modern lifestyle. I mean, weâre talking about chemicals,
believe it or not, in our toothpaste, in our deodorants, in our skin creams, in
our shampoos, in our household cleaning items, in the pesticides and herbicides
that we put on our lawns to make them pretty and green, in many of the things
that come off our cars; weâre not aware of it, but as we drive down the road,
our cars drop oil and grease, hydrocarbons, but they also drop bits of metal
and heavy metals - chromium, aluminum, mercury.
Lots of other heavy metals, including copper, which is pervasive, are bad for
nature and science has begun to trace them back as sources of either killing,
maiming or distorting the growth of various different fish and creatures, and
now scientists are starting to say thereâs growing evidence that they pose a
health threat to human beings in very, very serious areas like cancer, like
reproductive skills. I mean thereâs lower sperm count among men, and then
distortions in infant children when theyâre born, in their urinary tracts and
so forth.
So itâs a really disturbing trend, and science hasnât gotten to the bottom of
it and the EPA has not yet figured out how to regulate it.
DAVIES: And just to be clear: Weâre not talking about chemicals which are a
byâproduct of an industrial process and piped into a body of water. Weâre
talking about stuff that is in storm water run-off, by-products of the
chemicals that we use in our lives.
Mr. SMITH: Yeah, this is a radically different kind of pollution than the
pollution we started out worrying about back in the 1970s, that old industrial
pollution. This is pervasive. These are products that are throughout our
economy. You walk down the aisles of a grocery store and youâre looking at a
lot of these products every day. These are products that are now built into our
modern lifestyles. A matter of fact, itâs very interesting just the other day,
the EPA announced for the first time, and this is a big change over the last
decade or so, announced that they were going to ask a number of companies to
check into the certain chemicals, 65 specific chemicals, in these kinds of
products.
And some of the companies have begun to disclose some of these chemicals in
some states. Washington state, for example, has regulated PBDEs which are flame
retardants that are in childrenâs pajamas, that are in computers, that are in
couches, that are in rugs. These things, we donât even think about them. We
donât see them. In fact, thatâs a tell-tale sign of modern pollution. It is
largely invisible. Itâs not like the old pollution which was visible and
palpable. This stuff you canât see, you donât realize itâs there. And I think
thatâs one reason why the public isnât as concerned about how our environment
is and how our waterways are, the same way it was back in the â70s.
DAVIES: Right. Now, I live in Philadelphia. My drinking water gets drawn from
the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers. And people all over the country get water
from nearby bodies of water. And unlike decades ago, itâs now treated. There
are standards and there are treatment plants. To what extent are levels of
these new chemicals measured in our drinking water or treated in the plants?
Mr. SMITH: Well, the first thing you need to know is that â that the water that
gets into whatever drinking water system youâre using, comes from up river. And
up river, there are cities and communities as well as farming areas and so
forth, that have used the water before. So, everybody has - almost everybody is
using somebody elseâs wastewater that has been treated. So, how well itâs
treated upstream is very important. But when you get to these new chemicals,
theyâve come into being since standards were set. And what we were told by
scientists and by the U.S. Geological Survey is that there are no standards
set.
And frankly, only very recently, only in the last two or three years have
scientists developed the methods to detect these chemicals at the very small
levels at which they exist. But these chemicals are very harmful to nature and
potentially very harmful to humans at extremely low levels. So, number one,
there are no safety standards. And number two, there arenât the filters. The
old filters wonât catch them. We had one example here in the Washington
aqueduct, which takes the drinking water for the nationâs capital from the
Potomac River. The U.S. Geological Survey did some testing on that water body.
They had a watch list of 300 chemicals. They found 85 of them in the water
going into the intakes for the Washington drinking water system. And two thirds
of those made it through the filters into the tap water, into the drinking
water of the people of Washington, D.C. So, the answer is the old standards and
the old filters are not catching these new chemical dangers.
DAVIES: Hendrick Smith is senior producer and correspondent for the new
Frontline documentary âPoisoned Waters.â Weâll talk more after a break. This is
FRESH AIR.
(Soundbite of music)
DAVIES: If youâre just joining us, our guest is Hendrick Smith. He is a
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. He is also a senior producer and
correspondent of the new upcoming frontline program âPoisoned Waters.â You talk
in the documentary about the threat that unregulated development poses to the
nationâs bodies of water, happens all over the country. One of the most extreme
cases is Tysons Corner, Virginia. What makes it unique?
Mr. SMITH: Yeah, Tysons is a fascinating story. Itâs a story that sort of
epitomizes Americaâs romance with the car and the fantastic explosion and
sprawl of edge cities of suburbs that they became almost bigger than cities
themselves. Tysons Corner, 50 years ago, was a crossroads, literally a corner
in the midst of huge dairy farms, open farms, about a halfway between the
national airport and where is now Dulles or halfway between the Pentagon and
what is now Dulles airport. It is today an edge city where 120,000 people work
every day, larger than downtown Boston or downtown Phoenix or downtown Atlanta,
with a bigger workforce. It is absolutely choked with traffic. It has something
like 47 million square feet of office space and 40 million square feet of
parking lots.
Parking lots are devastating for the environment because they gather all kinds
of dirt and all kinds of chemicals and particularly I mentioned before, the
chemicals that come off cars, oil, grease, hydrocarbons, metals, all kinds of
industrial stuff that gets dumped and things that people throw away and so
forth. And when it rains, itâs just a sea. Itâs just sheets of water sliding
down into the nearby creeks, creeks of the Potomac River and into Chesapeake
Bay. So, from this environmental standpoint, itâs murder. And now, even for the
people who are the business leaders of Tysons Corner, it is choking on its own
success. Theyâre dying from cars and theyâre trying to figure out some way to
get out of it.
And whatâs interesting is some of the thinking is sort of changing at Tysons
Corner about whatâs the right way to go. Growth is coming but how do we handle
it?
DAVIES: And one of the issues of Tysons is that really it wasnât â it was
planned as a destination for work as an office area, not a residential
community, right?
Mr. SMITH: Yeah, thatâs one of the problems. I mean, cities grow up and you
have a mix of commerce and residence and industry. And Tysons Corner was both
one of the countryâs biggest shopping malls, I think itâs fifth or sixth
largest shopping mall, and itâs a huge office center with lots of the beltway
bandits, who are contractors of the Pentagon, National Security Agency, CIA,
whatever, all kinds of people work there. And they all travel there by car and
only about five or eight percent of them live there. Everybody commutes, so
itâs just an unbelievable continuous traffic jam almost around the clock.
DAVIES: You point out that thereâs an alternative development model nearby in
Arlington. Describe that.
Mr. SMITH: Well, whatâs interesting is, Arlington didnât have quite the same
set of choices. But it basically decided to build its development around the
metro system, which is Washingtonâs subway system and sometimes in the Virginia
suburbs itâs on the surface. But metro connects suburbs in Maryland and
Virginia with downtown Washington, D.C. and the whole District of Columbia. And
they have a quarter in which they get development which had about five or six
metro stops in Arlington, which is just across the Potomac River from D.C. And
around that area, over the last 25 or 30 years, population has doubled or
tripled.
The job numbers have doubled or tripled and the number of cars has stayed
roughly the same. So that you have not increased the congestion, you have â and
theyâve been very careful with the development of the way they handle storm
water runoff or the way they process the water, the way they channel the water.
And the result is that Arlington has had enormous growth, enormous economic
prosperity without any of the environmental or even traffic headaches that the
county next door where Tysons Corner exists has had. So, people are sort of
comparing these two development models.
Arlington is called smart growth. Itâs growing up, not growing out. They built
new apartment and office buildings on top of old used car lots and old parking
lots. So, the amount of impervious surfaces, paved surfaces, asphalt or
concrete has not increased. So that the water is still hitting the same area.
And actually there are more green spaces in the county than they were before,
not lot but a little bit. And the green spaces in the counties further out,
further away from the city have not been eaten up by suburban sprawl in part,
thanks to the concentrated development in Arlington.
DAVIES: You know, one of the interesting things about the ecological impacts of
this kind of development, the kind of development which paves over huge areas
and creates harmful storm water runoff, is that itâs different from the kind of
pollution that weâre accustomed to thinking of being the subject of Federal
regulation. The truth is, the development is largely a matter of local
officials, city officials, country zoning boards. So, to deal with this what do
you need, citizen activists who demand a different approach?
Mr. SMITH: Well, I have to say, Dave, one of the things that really interested
me in doing this documentary was to discover, first of all, I was shocked by
how bad the problem is and how long we put it on the back burner. And you can
do that for a while but after 25 years of deregulation and being on the back
burner, we need to do something. But the other thing that struck me was that
when communities get involved and there is grassroots civic action, they can
have a real impact. I mean, the decision to go to smart growth in Arlington
County was a decision made by the Arlington County council. It wasnât dictated
by the Federal government.
It wasnât dictated even by the state government of Virginia. And there was a
lot of interchange between the county government and all kinds of communities
in Arlington. So, it was a very grassroots, democratic process. And in two
counties over in Loudon County, they have in recent years had the horrendous
battle between people who are trying to preserve the county as having a lot of
green space but still being handy to the metropolitan area against developers
who are for pell-mell development.
And they want to go the way of Tysons Corner with intense sprawl and bringing
in all this traffic and building many more highways. And the local activists
led by a group called the Piedmont Environmental Council really energized all
kinds of local activists to oppose this pell-mell growth, to try to keep growth
channeled into certain areas. And the argument really wasnât interesting enough
about the environment. Chris Miller, the head of Piedmont Environmental Council
says you got to retail environmental politics.
Youâve got to make it relevant to people about whatâs going on in their
backyard. And thatâs traffic congestion, thatâs raising tax rates paying the
cost the developers need for the infrastructure that makes it profitable for
them to move in. And building many more new schools and having your kids jump
from one school to another. These are enormous headaches for the people in
Loudon County. So, they effectively fought off uncontrolled development. They
didnât say they were for no growth, but they tried to channel the growth into
certain areas and to manage it. And in both communities, in Arlington County
and in Loudon County, I mean it does show that if you get involved, you can
have an impact.
DAVIES: Well, weâre out of time. Hendrick Smith, thanks so much for speaking
with us.
Mr. SMITH: Thank you.
GROSS: Hendrick Smith spoke with FRESH AIR contributor Dave Davies. Smith is a
senior producer and correspondent for tomorrow nightâs PBS Frontline
documentary âPoisoned Waters.â David Davies is a senior writer for the
Philadelphia Daily News. You can download Podcasts of our show on our Web site,
freshair.npr.org.
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