"Dioxins in Excess of the Permitted Standard"

A South Korean court orders Monsanto and Dow Chemicals to pay around $61 million U.S. for damages caused to 6,800 South Korean troops fighting on the American/South Vietnamese side in the Vietnam War by Agent Orange. (In previous court cases, the companies have forked over $180 million into a fund for U.S. soldiers supposedly injured by the dioxin-filled defoliant, with no admission of wrongdoing.) From the Forbes story:

"The defoliants manufactured by the accused contained dioxins in excess of the permitted standard due to product design flaws," the ruling said.

[Link courtesy Rational Review.]

Comments

[Russ 2000]

Off topic:

Am I the only one who noticed the carpet humper is missing? Or am I just unobservant?

[SR]

Good point, I hadn't even thought about it.

[Brian Doherty]

I just know I'll regret stepping into this one, but whatever are you two talking about?

[Qbryzan]

They are talking about Carpet Humping Man, mascot of the Ultimate Fitness Program, the ad that used to live on the right side of the screen, which can still be viewed on the page for The American Conservative.

[Ed]

The body-building guy who had an ad on this site almost forever and who earned his moniker by doing pushups on (or humping) the carpet.

[SR]

"I just know I'll regret stepping into this one, but whatever are you two talking about?"

Now we know who doesn't regularly read his own magazine's blog! 😉

[Justin Slotman]

Hey yeah--he's gone. It was the bald guy in shorts, right? I never actually clicked on it--it looked like a link to weird Jeff Gannon porn.

[Brian Doherty]

Ads honestly become somewhat of a blur to me. That said, please continue to patronize all our fine sponsors.

[Stevo Darkly]

Hmm ... I don't know who Jeff Gannon is, and I'm afraid to Google him to find out. Yet I am vexed by my inability to catch the reference.

I think the carpet-humper has been supplanted by The Man With the Azure Shorts.

[B.P.]

Carpet Humping Guy succumbed to the rising waters on Tuvalu Island. Or maybe it was the absinthe.

[Qbryzan]

I don't know who Jeff Gannon is, and I'm afraid to Google him to find out.

Stevo, go ahead and google, but I'll give you a hint: "gay prostitute" and "white house"

[Neil Block]

Brian Doherty -- just to pick nits, it's "Dow Chemical" (singular).

I'm from Midland, Michigan, which is world headquarters to Dow Chemical and Dow Corning. The latter pays my college tuition, and the former helps fund a nonprofit which I worked for for three years. So I guess you could say I don't like this decision. And, no, I don't have any cancerous developments due to dioxin OR Agent Orange, even though as a child I played in the dirt downriver from Dow.

[April]

Carpet Humping Guy is replaced with Carpet-Chested Guy. Cleaner in one sense, but not in another.

[Russ 2000]

On topic:

This sounds rather like a rip-off. I mean, it's not like Monsanto or Dow sprayed the stuff themselves, they were asked to make a product for the US DoD. The DoD used it without testing to make sure it matched the specs? Or did it match the specs and the US overused it?

The closest analogy I could come up with quickly was Taser. If they claim that, with proper use their gun won't kill anyone and a cop uses one twelve times on a person, is Taser liable?

[James]

Russ: the logic is that dioxin is not supposed to be in Agent Orange. Agent Orange is a mixture of two herbicides (2,4,5 D and 2,4,5 T as I recall) that seem to combine to form dioxin when mixed under certain conditions. The manufacturers knew this as early as 1967 and there were even worried meetings between executives about the potential ramifications of attempting production of Agent Orange on such a large scale.

The biggest threat to Monsanto and Dow is Vietnam. If the Vietnamese ever decide to sue the companies over dioxin the potential liabilities are enormous. That's not to say that all their birth defects and cancers are caused by dioxin (malnutrition in areas cleared by herbicide is more likely to blame) but imprecise causal links mean less in a courtroom than pictures of little children without limbs.

Oddly, the Vietnamese government has been more interested in using the issue for political effect than in actually pursuing the case, possibly because political effect is useful to the government and reparations would be paid to individual citizens.

[DustinR]

How about how much money they (South Korea) owe the American taxpayer for wasting billions of dollars and national prestige just for a stalemate.

[Russ 2000]

The manufacturers knew this as early as 1967 and there were even worried meetings between executives about the potential ramifications of attempting production of Agent Orange on such a large scale.

OK, but what was the DoD's reaction at the time? If executives were worried about it, wouldn't word have gotten to the DoD? Something along the lines of "Are you sure you want to use this stuff?" The DoD conveniently becomes stupid when liability is involved.

[James]

Russ: good question. In a 1988 letter to Congress, USAF scientist Dr James Clary, who had helped to write a history of Operation Ranch Hand, said that the USAF knew that: the effectiveness of defoliation was limited; that long-term use of herbicides carried environmental health risks due to dioxin contamination; and that the concentration of dioxin was higher in the military formulation than the civilian, because of the accelerated, low-cost production program. They simply never intended to make so much of this stuff. He said that this was known as early as 1967.

Spraying was not "curtailed" intil late 1969 and did not end until the middle of 1971. Worse, defoliant spraying was combined with incendiary strikes in some areas in 1966 and 1967. Heating dioxin apparently makes it more toxic.

Clary noted that because the intention was to use the defoliants on the "enemy," (including his family and anybody else who happened to be standing around) no one really cared about dioxin concentrations.

Most of this was plagiarized from

http://www.usvetdsp.com/agentorange.htm

None of it shocks me very much, but I'm a deeply cynical person.