What A Day - How We Got Here: How Lead Poisoning Rewired America

Episode Date: February 17, 2024

What do the 1970s crime wave, the endangerment of the California condor, and Gen Xers demanding to speak to the manager have in common? There’s a compelling case that all are exacerbated by lead exposure. This week How We Got Here unpacks the long and sordid story of how lead found its way into gasoline…and the organs of many Americans. But gas is just the tip of the iceberg—we still see lead in consumer products today, from drinking water to baby food to Stanley Cups. Why do we still use this poisonous metal? What does it do to our brains? And who does it impact the most? Hysteria’s Erin Ryan and Offline’s Max Fisher unpack what lead us to this point.

Here's a riddle for you, Max. What do the 1970s crime wave, the extinction of the California condor, rowdy crowds at NASCAR races, and Gen Xers demanding to speak to the manager have in common? Are they all things caused by Republican governors of California? That is a really good guess. But no, Arnold Schwarzenegger has nothing to do with these things. There's a compelling case that all of these things are caused, at least in part, by lead. So lead has been the star of a few news stories this week. There's a panic over lead in the insulation of Stanley mugs, the trendiest beverage accessory since flask at prom.

And the CDC reported more than 400 possible cases of lead poisoning in babies and toddlers from tainted applesauce pouches. Is that what this is about? Yes. So the mugs are probably fine, but the applesauce situation is bad and getting worse. So we'll come back to that. In order to understand the panic around these stories, I wanted to talk about lead. I have been obsessed with it. You have been obsessed with lead.

For years. I do not shut talk about lead. I have been obsessed with it. You have been obsessed with lead. For years. I do not shut up about lead. But the more research I read on it, the more I feel like it could explain why America is the way it is. And the alarm over Stanley Mugs, while misplaced, is both a reminder that lead is everywhere and has been for decades and a sign to me that I'm not alone in thinking that lead has a lot to answer for. Max, have you seen these TikTok videos about the lead stare? I love the lead poisoning stare that boomers give you. And I especially like it if they don't like something about you, like your physical appearance, something that you're wearing, whatever. They just point it out. They don't say it's good or bad. They just point it out and then they just

stare at you. What's going on behind those two eyes? Because I really can't fucking tell. So could it really be true that an entire generation is quietly suffering from lead poisoning? Quietly is doing a lot of lifting in that sentence, right? Well, the memification of lead poisoning glosses over the serious and widespread implications of what happens when entire generations are doused in a neurotoxin. I hate to be a Debbie Downer. This week, we're talking about the miracle element slash poison that we spewed into American air for 50 years and the ways that those fumes may have harmed two entire generations that were exposed to them. I'm Erin Ryan. I'm Max Fisher.

And this is How We Got Here, a new What A Day series where Max and I explore a big question behind the week's headlines and tell a story that answers that question. Our question this week, did lead poisoning change America? And is it still? Okay, so the story I want to tell you is about this stretch of time, mostly from the 1930s to the 80s, where basically every car in America was churning lead into the atmosphere and what that did to us. So Max, at the center of all this is a sound, a troublesome sound that automakers wanted to do something about. It was called engine knocking. Anything with cars more complicated than the door handle is kind of a mystery to me, so you'll have to explain that. Some door handles are actually a challenge to me, so that may not be the best example. I appreciate that. So a combustion engine works by all these little explosions pushing cylinders at the exact right moment in a cycle. Knocking is

when the explosions ignite early and you get that popping sound. It reduces efficiency and can damage the engine over the long term. It used to be a common problem, but in 1921, automakers discovered that putting lead in the fuel fixed it. So we should say that while many harms from lead weren't understood until decades after this, Detroit knew at the time that this was dangerous. The guy who invented leaded gasoline was actually incapacitated with lead poisoning, and a few of the workers at the first leaded gasoline plant died. That's called pulling a Marie Curie. Lead has been used for centuries because it's malleable,

durable, and non-corrosive. It makes colors brighter, so it's great for paint and cosmetics, except probably you don't want to put it on your face because it's lead. It's a poison. It's a poison. But it's still in car batteries. It's in electronics, manufacturing byproducts, and technology, including your laptop and your phone. Whoa. Yeah. I have those things on me right now. Yes. You've got lead less than two feet from you right now. In the Roman Empire, rich people's houses had lead pipes and they drank wine out of lead chalices because it made it taste better. Lead is so durable that some of those lead pipes are still functional today. Do we think that lead is better with white wines or reds? Well, actually, unfortunately for a lot of people, lead has a sweet taste to it.

But we shouldn't joke. Don't drink lead. Don't drink lead. Don taste to it. But we shouldn't joke. Don't drink lead. Don't drink lead. Don't do it. The Romans were actually so nuts for lead that its chemical symbol, PB, derived from the Latin word plumbum, which means plumbing.

Oh, huh. I love a good etymology fact. Same. Anyway, this is all to say that the Romans knew lead could be both useful and harmful. People outside of Rome have known since at least as early as the second century BCE when a Greek physician named De Socrates, which is spelled Disco Rides, noted that lead makes the mind give way.

Doctors in the 1700s also recorded artisans working with pottery and paint experiencing lead poisoning. And today, actually, if you work with pottery, you've got to be careful. Really? Because you have a higher risk of being exposed to lead. So this stuff is everywhere. It is. But until the modern era, most cases of lead poisoning were found among people who were occupationally exposed. It wasn't something that could just happen to a person going about their life. And even now, it's only really dangerous if it gets inside your body.

So putting on the lead smock to get x-rayed at the dentist is fine? That's what they're telling us, and I hope they're telling us the truth. No, it should be fine, but the lead in the circuit board of your computer, also fine. It's protecting you from radiation. But unfortunately, once lead gets inside your body, it doesn't like to leave. So when automakers and energy companies start by the 1930s designing everything around leaded gasoline, they know they're pumping it into the air. It becomes this big science experiment. What happens when pretty much all of America starts absorbing something that we've known for hundreds of years to be toxic into their lungs and bloodstreams? Better put on my leaden thinking cap for that one.

Okay, so I see where this is going. You're getting ready to talk about that famous chart. Let's pull it up real quick. Americans drive more cars and pump more of that fancy new leaded gasoline into the air. Then the line starts to turn and it starts to drop back down and decline in the late 70s when the EPA passes all these regulations to limit air pollution. And it keeps dropping into the 80s. We remove lead from gasoline. And it finally gets near zero in into the 80s. We remove lead from gasoline and it finally gets near zero in the mid 90s. Right. It looks like an upside down U or an N without a stick on the side. The amount of lead in the air goes up and then it goes down. So then the other line in this famous chart shows the violent crime rate over time. And what do you know? The line charting violent crime

looks exactly like the line charting violent crime looks exactly like the line charting lead in the atmosphere, except every dip and rise in the lead pollution line corresponds to an almost identical dip and rise in the violent crime line 23 years later. Yeah, as if the people who ingested lead as children in, say, the 1940s then grew up to commit violent crimes in the 1960s. The more lead, the more violent crimes 23 years later. It's called the lead crime hypothesis. That's why, for example, there were so many absolutely bonkers serial killers operating in the 1960s through the 1980s. Because of lead. Because of lead. So goes the hypothesis. So is the

theory. To make matters worse, at the same time, lead paint was fairly ubiquitous in American homes up until it was banned from indoor use in 1978. In some places, it was banned before. Baltimore banned it in 1951. Baltimore leading the way. Yeah, leading the way of not being lead poisoned. So in addition to breathing lead fumes, many American children grew up in houses covered in an element that if that paint got eroded into dust or some other form that could be ingested, could lead to all kinds of bad health outcomes. So I have always assumed that this idea, you know, the lead crime hypothesis, as it's called, this famous chart, it's one of those things that at first blush, like it looks like a slam dunk, lead causes violent crime.

Like lead goes up, crime goes up. But that at examination, it would kind of fall apart or it would turn out to be a coincidence or it's correlation without causation or something like that. I think this is actually the opposite of that. So, yes, the rise and fall of violent crime in America, which peaked in the early 1970s, had a lot of causes. We can't just put this all on lead. But the more research we get on those peak lead years from about 1950 to 1980, the more damning it looks. The guy who first identified this link, an economist named Rick Nevin, looked at the data for a bunch of other countries, too, and he found the same thing. Lead in the air went up.

Violent crime went up about 20 or so years later. Lead in the air went down. So did violent crime. Oh, wow. Another economist, Jessica Rolpaul-Huez, also checked this by looking at the state level, since different states had different emission requirements for cars, and found the same thing. She even found that when air quality improved slowly or quickly, crime later fell at a similar rate. And a 2022 meta-analysis of 24 different lead crime hypothesis studies found, quote, substantial evidence tying exposure to lead to criminal behavior, and in particular, violent criminal behavior. Max, did you know

that the average person in 1987 was six times more likely to be victimized by a serial killer than the average person in 2015? I mean, the entire true crime genre as we know it would be nowhere without engine knock. That is wild. Okay, I'm still locking my windows though. But okay, my big question here is why? Like I think the thing I am stuck on is why would lead in the air make people more likely to 20 years later suddenly stick up a convenience store, get in a bar fight? So you need to understand what lead does when it gets into your body. And I

apologize in advance because this is disturbing and upsetting. Unfortunately for us and most carbon-based life forms, lead behaves like calcium, which means it bonds to places where calcium would normally be helpful and mucks up the process. Oh, so like bones, muscles, oh no, and brain matter. Yes. It is a substance that can cause multisystemic issues. Everything from cardiovascular disease to chronic kidney failure. It also messes with hormone production and fertility and has been associated with strokes. In general, it simply increases mortality. Lead kills you. It erodes a particular substance called myelin that insulates the nerves in your brain so those nerves can communicate. Oh, like the insulation around a wire,

except in your brain. Right. Exactly. And we do use lead to insulate wires, which is interesting. But we shouldn't be using lead to insulate brain. Not our brain wires. Not good brain wire insulation. It also prevents your brain from growing myelin in the first place, which is why lead exposure is so dangerous for kids whose brains are still developing. So what happens when you don't have myelin because of the effects of lead? Your brain works more slowly because those connective wires aren't protected, and it's less coordinated.

So different parts of your brain have trouble talking to each other. And people exposed to lead as children end up, as adults, with a smaller prefrontal cortex. Yikes. Okay, that explains a lot because you often hear scientists call the prefrontal cortex the part of our brain that distinguishes us from other animals. It's especially associated with something called executive function that's really important. And executive function basically means our ability to control our own behavior, to manage our emotions, to reason, to plan, and to so on, rather than to act on moment-to-moment impulse. Exactly. The effects of this can be pretty profound. People with even small amounts of

childhood-led exposure grow up to be more prone to aggressive behavior. They have higher rates of ADHD. In studies, they tend to be less conscientious of others and less agreeable. They are also more neurotic. Wow, those are really significant changes. I feel like the big one I always hear about is the effect on intelligence. Yeah, people exposed to lead as kids lose about five to eight IQ points. And we're not talking about some tiny fringe who ate lead paint chips. One study in 2022 estimated that all Americans born in the 1960s and 1970s, when leaded gas was at its peak, lost up to six or seven IQ points. So the theory as I understand it is not that some particular slice of Americans got like radicalized by lead poisoning

into becoming criminals. It's actually a lot scarier that pretty much all Americans born in this 1950 to 1980 period got at least a little lead poisoned. And that made them on average a bit less intelligent, more aggressive, and basically less in control of themselves or their emotions. Right. Violent crime is just one worst case outcome for a person exposed to lead during formative years. But everyone was exposed. The CDC now thinks that between 1976 and 1980, 99.8% of children between the ages of 1 and 5 had unhealthy amounts of lead in their systems. Whoa.

And at one point, the average American had 20 micrograms per deciliter of lead in their blood. 10 micrograms per deciliter is considered an elevated level in adults. Wow. Now, obviously, 99.8% of Americans born in the late 1970s did not go on to become criminals, but there is still time. But the subtle effects of lead poisoning are probably pretty pervasive for them. A lot of these people might be victimized in ways they're not even aware of. Maybe they have a harder time in school or focusing at work or getting along with

colleagues or maintaining emotionally healthy relationships. There's some reason to believe that people with low-level lead poisoning are even more prone to getting scammed. Anna Werner looks at whether some finance companies have targeted the victims of lead poisoning and left them penniless. If you're telling me that Gen X is the most affected, I feel like that explains a lot about pop culture. Like, this adds an interesting element to my ongoing critical analysis of the early catalog of Limp Bizkit.

Yes, like violent crime, there were many causes for Limp Bizkit. But we can't rule out that lead may have been a contributing factor. I mean, you remember the song Break Stuff? Let the bodies hit the floor, Erin. That's not Limp Bizkit, but I will allow it. I was still implicated. So, okay, like you said, America started phasing out leaded gasoline in the 1970s, though it wasn't totally gone until, and this shocked me, 1996. So that was 30 years ago. Is it over? If you were born after 1996, you can breathe a sigh of relief for sure.

You've got enough to worry about, but being poisoned by lead as a child is probably not one of them. Cross that off the list. But knowing how aggressive, antisocial, and unhealthy this makes people, through literally no fault of their own, we're going to be living with the consequences as long as we're sharing this planet with moderately lead-poisoned boomers and severely lead-poisoned Gen Xers. Think about the age of elected officials. Think about the age of judges, CEOs, decision makers across industries. These people, for the most part, fall squarely in the lead generation. Boy, I can't wait for our first Oval Office lead stare from President Kid Rock. Don't even speak that into the universe.

He's got some interesting ideas. He sure does. Ba-wit-da-ba is his economic plan. Ba-wit- with the ba 2044. Yes. No. Oh, please, no. So, lettuce sought after because it's incredibly durable, remember? And as a result, it's a huge pain to get rid of. It has settled into the soil, especially in the car-heavy cores of big cities. Max, would you like to guess where schools tend to be built? It's by highways, where the lead that soaked into the dirt over decades when we're using that gasoline still gets kicked up and tracked into classrooms. Or in the summer when that soil dries up, the lead follows the moisture back into the atmosphere and we do it all over again.

Yeah, and lead contamination still happens in other ways. If you live in a house that was built before 1978, there's a chance there's still some lead paint residue lingering around both indoors and out. If you live near a construction or demolition site, or if your water source is polluted and you're using old lead pipes. Oh, you're thinking about Flint, Michigan, where of course lead levels spiked in the drinking water starting in 2014. The town, which is predominantly black, had switched to a new water source, but did not take the proper steps to prevent the pipes from corroding. Pipes are made with lead,

so that corrosion became toxic. They kept telling us something was safe and it was revealed that it wasn't safe. We had to rely on outside agencies to let us know that the water was poison and we already knew it was, but we had to prove it. And of course, what's happening in Flint is both outrageous in itself was poison and we already knew it was, but we had to prove it.

And of course, what's happening in Flint is both outrageous in itself and a symbol of the ways that racial disparities and wealth disparities and things like health and access to education get worsened even more because they're also disproportionately affected by these sorts of pollutants. And this is still a global issue. You know, we phased out lead in our gasoline, but there are parts of the world where lead is still used in a lot of manufacturing. Huge parts. Yeah, China, they're still using lead in paint. And people in the developing world and marginalized populations within those countries

are still bearing the brunt of the impact of lead pollution. The lead in gasoline crisis took decades to finally address, but it probably would have taken even longer if not for the fact that it affected everyone. Instead of just settling on marginalized communities, which powerful people love to ignore, everybody was getting lead poisoned. So now when environmental issues like lead pop up, it often affects marginalized communities more or is allowed to affect them more. So it's not treated as much.

And I feel like something that we at least understand now, even if we don't always act on it, is that no level of lead exposure is safe. NASCAR, I learned, did not ban leaded gasoline from its races until 2007. around the racetracks just for this one racing league. Mortality rates among elderly people dropped by almost 2% just from them switching out that gas. So the NASCAR races alone, they concluded were causing 4,000 premature deaths a year. And this is just from a few cars going around a track. Yeah, but cars go fast. It's a good point. But car go fast. That is so upsetting. That is so upsetting. Well, it's not just a danger to humans. It is now thought that lead poisoning may be one of the primary culprits for the near extinction of the California condor. Huh. Another thing that I have been obsessed with for almost as long as I've been obsessed with lead. So sometimes California condors would eat carrion that had been shot, and a lot of ammunition contained lead.

Oh, because they're scavengers. Exactly. And so condors are just really, really susceptible and sensitive to lead. It was just killing them in droves. By 1987, only 27 California condors remained. And that's because of lead. And that's mostly because of lead. I never knew that that was a lead thing. Yeah. And now thanks to an aggressive capture and breeding program, that number's up to 561. Their numbers continue to grow thanks in part to the fact that California banned lead ammunition in 2013. Okay. So back to my precious Stanley mugs. You are a collector. Your desk is just an army of Stanley mugs.

I'm actually, I'm recording this underneath my pile of Stanley mugs right now. You sound great. It was a real pain for our editor to put this all together. The soundproofing from the insulation in the Stanley mugs has lead in it, but really effective. Works really well. Okay. So, okay, on the mugs, my understanding is that unless you grind them up like black pepper over your pasta, they're not actually unsafe. But the fear around them is a reminder that we're still figuring out how to coexist with lead safety, right?

Like those applesauce pouches that were contaminated with lead that we talked about earlier. Like the CDC is still figuring out how extensive that contamination was. And this is something happening right now. It is so, it is so, so bad. I have a two-year-old and I have a lot of friends with kids that are really little. And just the idea that you could be doing what you think is the right thing. You get them an applesauce pouch, low sugar, great. They'll eat it. They'll just, you know, it's a way to get them to eat something that isn't macaroni and cheese. And the fact that it could be contaminated with a neurotoxin.

Because there's so much lead in our environment. Well, because there's so much lead in the cinnamon. So basically, this past week, regulators found that applesauce pouches that contained 2,000 times the amount of lead that regulators deem acceptable impacted at least 442 people, mostly babies and toddlers, across 44 states. Oh, my God. And the culprit in the case was cinnamon, lead-contaminated cinnamon that slipped through the cracks. Another culprit in the case, the complete failure of the government to adequately inspect and test baby food for heavy metals. And there's little to be done for the hundreds of families

who've already been impacted by this. You've got a kid, you get them tested, you think they might have taken in one of these applesauce pouches. They have elevated levels of lead and there's not very much you can do. So the FDA, I learned, actually only set specific lead limits for apple juice and candy in 2022, which is not to say that those things were brimming with lead up until then, but just that we are really still adjusting to the existence of lead in our society. And we're constantly playing a game of ketchup. A chemical is released into the environment before we really know the total effect of it. We're discovering that it's actually really bad. We're trying to chase it down. But by then, it's endemic. It's

everywhere. It's in soil. It's in water. It's in plants. It's in animals. And what recourse do we have? I think that this story brings up a couple of sad truths that I don't think get talked about enough. And one is that lead poisoning is something that happened to people and is beyond any individual's control. So, you know, it might be, you know, interesting to watch a Karen throw a Frappuccino across a Starbucks counter because she can't control her emotions. But this video actually might be someone who was literally poisoned as a child trying to move through the world with a brain that cannot function. And all of it was done so that some post-war nuclear family's boat-sized car would make less noise. And there are also a lot of problems in society that are attributed to individual choice or cultural influence that are probably actually the result of our environment

and things beyond our control. And environmental causes of behavioral and public health problems are usually studied after the fact rather than before the fact. And to my third point, corporations see no problem gambling public health in the name of short-term profit. And we are footing the emotional and the fiscal bill for that. You know, the long-term impacts of generational lead exposure is something that we, as in people born after 1978, will have to deal with. You know, as boomers and Gen Xers continue to age and need more medical care, we're going to have to deal with the fact that some of the medical care that they will need, they would ostensibly not have needed had they not been exposed to a neurotoxin during so many of their formative years. I think if I'm like fully honest with myself, part of why I was initially resistant to this theory is that I just I didn't like what it implies about how malleable our sense of self is. You know, it's one thing to hear that chemicals might cause problems with our bodies, but you want to think that your personality and your intelligence are things

that emerge from this inner you that is kind of immutable and fixed. Like, I'm not religious, but I guess it kind of is like a soul. And it's scary to find out that on some level, we are all the products of whatever chemicals happen to be in our environments. Yeah. I mean, we are products of our environments. And the fact that we are not paying enough attention to what is going into the environment and what the effects of those things are does us a disservice in both understanding ourselves and understanding life in general. And so, you know, we've talked a lot about how lead peaked in the 1970s. And so people who were born in the 1970s, you know, are getting the brunt of it.

I think it's important to remember that looking forward, there are other chemicals that are being used ubiquitously in food service, in manufacturing, in construction, in diapers. You know, there are chemicals that are being used right now that we don't know the impact of. And one thing that we can learn from this very frustrating story is that as voters and as human beings, we should be more on top of that. Well, Erin, that is the story of how America poisoned itself with lead over 50 years and only just took it out of the air. Erin, stay safe out there. Try not to chew on any Stanley mugs.

I will do my best to not chew on Stanley mugs, even though I was born kind of in that shadow period. You're just after the line. Where I may possibly have had some elevated lead exposure. I want to leave our listeners with an ad from the early 1970s that helped me as a lady explain car combustion engines and how it might be a good idea to take lead out of our gasoline. So enjoy. If you are a woman, you're not expected to know much about cars, but they're not difficult to understand once you know that like you, your car breathes. All that an engine does, no matter how simple or complex it is, is draw in air, mix it with gasoline,

and burn the mixture for power. That's all. Atlantic Richfield hopes you do understand your car because then you'll understand their new gasoline, Arco Supreme. It helps cars breathe easy. Knowing that should help you breathe easy on the road. Arco Supreme gasoline helps your car breathe in easy to breathe out cleaner. What a Day's How We Got Here is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Max Fisher, and by Aaron Ryan. Our producer is Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer.

Evan Sutton is our sound editor. Kyle Segwin, Charlotte Landis, and Vassasilis Fotopoulos sound engineered the show. Production support from Leo Sussan, Itsy Quintanilla, Raven Yamamoto, Natalie Bettendorf, and Adrian Hill. And special thanks to What A Day hosts Travelle Anderson, Priyanka Arabindi, Josie Duffy Rice, and Juanita Tolliver for welcoming us to the family.