This is Chapter 25 of my new book, working title “The Industry Playbook: Corporate Cartels, Corruption and Crimes Against Humanity” that is being published online chapter by chapter.
If you’re like me, you might recall commercials on TV about mesothelioma and lawsuits you can join. That and the idea that asbestos causes cancer was pretty much the extent of my knowledge about this industry.
You might also think that with the link so clear that asbestos is no longer use. As this chart shows, while it is down from its peak, asbestos production is certainly still strong.
Asbestos is a fibrous mineral that causes cancer, specifically the predominant form linked to it, mesothelioma. Just like tobacco, this is not the only disease linked to asbestos, the other main ones being asbestosis as well as lung cancer.
Barry Castleman, writes in Criminality and Asbestos in Industry, “Dominant companies in the asbestos industry have knowingly and recklessly endangered the health of their workers, their customers, and whole communities in the pursuit of profits since the 1930s. The fact of such business practices being so pervasive, often involving conspiracy in addition to misconduct by individual enterprizes, stands as an indictment of the social order. This documented breadth of misconduct throughout an industry points to a consistent legal, ethical, and corporate failure, not an aberrant one.”
There’s that conspiracy word again! That gives a quick overview, but now let’s dive into the specifics and the playbook strategies you should be familiar with by this point. Note that the time line of the asbestos industry is very close to that of tobacco.
Asbestos was used in industry because the fibers were strong, durable and resistant to fire, while also being flexible. Asbestos was widely using in buildings, automobiles, shipyards, and other areas, most notably as an insulating material that is heat resistant.
This picture from 1941 shows a nurse laying an asbestos blanket over an electric heater to warm a patient.
The biggest asbestos mining and manufacturing companies included Johns-Manville in the US and Cape Asbestos and Turner & Newall (T&N) in the UK. These companies, known as the “Big Three,” dominated the industry.
Here is a couple of ads from Johns-Manville showing some common places asbestos was used in the home.
Internal Science Kept Under Wraps
As with tobacco, the industrial scientists were the first to know about harms. That they knew all along was revealed through the discovery process brought on by litigation.
There was a 1947 report by W.C.L. Hemeon who was the head engineer of the Industrial Hygiene Foundation of America. This document showed that 20 percent of the workforce at two facilities developed asbestosis. It reported that the current safety standards were insufficient and did not protect workers.
Another case in 1995 led to discovery of internal documentation from Turner & Newell, one of the big three. This internal study found that only 17 or 108 men, and 3 of 18 women, that worked in mines were free of asbestosis. This damning information from 1929 was of course not published.
Johns-Manville company doctors monitored the health of their mine workers. The company doctors told miners their health problems were their own fault because of smoking or other causes, while telling their bosses the true cause. After deaths their lungs were autopsied to be studied. But none of this information was brought to light until court discovery decades later.
In 1948, company executives met to discuss their own science showing asbestos causing cancer in rats. They ordered all reference to cancer and tumors be removed before publishing a report.
The Public Science Builds
Dr. E.R.A. Mereweather published the first epidemiological study of asbestosis in 1930. He found that the average age of workers dying was 41.
“If only the slightest exposure to the dust results ultimately in death, then the scope of the necessary preventive measures is summed up in one word—prohibition—for, practically speaking, it is impossible to prevent such exposure,” he said in 1933.
In 1955, Richard Doll from the Statistical Research Unit, Medical Research Council, in London, showed the first epidemiological evidence of asbestos causing lung cancer among textile workers.
J.C. Wagner’s 1960 study was the first to find an association between mesotheliomas and those living near an asbestos mine in South Africa. This showed the workers weren’t the only ones in danger, but those living close by.
In the USA, the marking point for the science came in 1964. Dr. Irving Selikoff published research establishing a link between asbestos and disease. Note how this turning point of the science was roughly around the same time as tobacco, as 1964 was when the Surgeon General’s report came out.
The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health stated in 1980 that, “All levels of asbestos exposure studied to date have demonstrated asbestos-related disease…there is no level of exposure below which clinical effects do not occur.”
The Attacks on Dr. Selikoff
Dr. Selikoff was involved in a conference at Mount Sinai Hospital. After this he was contacted by the attorneys of the Asbestos Textile Institute. In 1964 their lawyers threatened that they “urge caution in the discussion of these activities to avoid providing the basis for possibly damaging and misleading news stories. The right to study and to discuss these subjects is clear, of course. But the gravity of the subject matter and the consequences implicitly involved impose upon any who exercise those rights a very high degree of responsibility for their actions.”
A 2007 article in the International Journal of Health Services details the smear campaign that would ramp up. “Selikoff was consistently demonized as a media zealot who exaggerated the risks of asbestos on the back of bogus medical qualifications and flawed science. Since his death, the criticism has become even more vituperative and claims have persisted that he was malicious or a medical fraud. However, most of the attacks on Selikoff were inspired by the asbestos industry or its sympathizers, and for much of his career he was the victim of a sustained and orchestrated campaign to discredit him. The most serious criticisms usually more accurately describe his detractors than Selikoff himself.”
One such attack came from P.W.J. Bartrip titled, “Irving John Selikoff and the strange case of the missing medical degrees.” They accused him of not having a medical degree. He did, though the journal that published the attack refused to publish the degree or retract the article.
Unsurprisingly, internal documentation from the companies included titles such as “Discredit Selikoff.” Selikoff was the main target, but by no means the only one.
The Science Debate Shifts
Recall how the scientific/PR defense of Big Tobacco moved away from saying that smoking didn’t cause disease once that battle was fully lost. They shifted gears to saying tobacco wasn’t addictive, that secondhand smoke wasn’t a problem, that filters worked and more.
And so we see with the asbestos industry a similar shift.
Asbestos is found in six different naturally occurring minerals. These include brown asbestos, blue asbestos and white asbestos.
Once they could no longer hide it, the industry argued that most forms of asbestos were dangerous, but that white asbestos was safe. In the end this turned out to be nothing more than PR spin. And it also was very beneficial to the industry as white asbestos was the vast majority of what was mined.
Paul Cullinan, Professor of Occupational and Environmental Respiratory Disease at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London, said, “It’s probably the case that white asbestos is less toxic in respect to mesothelioma than the amphiboles. The industry tries to argue that you can take precautions so that white asbestos can be used safely, but in practice, in the real world, that is not what is going to happen.”
Front Organizations and Institution Infiltration
Groups such as the Asbestos Research Council and the Asbestos Information Committee were formed and used to prop up the PR front.
Dr. Crump worked as a consultant for the Asbestos Information Association. He testified against OSHA regulation in 1984. In the early 2000’s he was contracted by the EPA to develop a mathematical model for risks of asbestos. His model found that white asbestos was not a threat. His model relied on a dose-response analysis done by J.C. McDonald, another industry-funded researcher.
The Institute of Occupational & Environmental Health at McGill University was funded by the Quebec asbestos mining industry. Jock McCulloch, a historian at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University, wrote, “As the crisis over mesothelioma deepened, the Canadian and South African governments sided uncritically with industry. In 1984, the Asbestos Institute (AI) was formed in Quebec. From its inception, the AI has been dedicated to the ‘safe use of chrysotile asbestos,’ through conferences, public relations initiatives, and the dissemination of scientific information. AI, which describes itself as a ‘non-profit’ organization, has been subsidised by Canadian governments. By 1999 it had received in excess of $40 million in sponsorship.”
Litigation Bankrupts Some but Not All
The first asbestos-related lawsuit in the US was filed in Texas in 1966. As already mentioned, it was the discovery process that led to the revelations about just how much the industry was aware of the problems.
One unique thing about the story of asbestos, is that this litigation did drive many of the asbestos companies into bankruptcy. Their power was not on the level of Big Tobacco, and thus, for the most part, they weren’t able to stop the turn of tide against them.
Asbestos liabilities led to at least 70 companies going bankrupt since 1976. But that was the smaller producers. The bigger companies were able to survive through underhanded means.
McCulloch wrote, “The tide of litigation that began in the mid 1970s saw the major U.S. producers, including Johns Manville and Raybestos-Manhattan, take refuge in bankruptcy and subsequently re-invent themselves as non-asbestos companies. Simultaneously, the industry shifted offshore to the developing world, where despite the known dangers, more than 2 million tons of chrysotile were used during 2004. The industry’s survival has been due largely to its success in keeping alive the fiction that asbestos can be used safely. Arguably its most potent weapons have been the suppression of evidence about the hazards of asbestos and even the corruption of science to promote doubt about the mineral’s toxicity.”
Here you find the tactic of going worldwide used once again. But also a new tactic of “Beneficial Bankruptcies” that we’ll see play out elsewhere across industries. Bankruptcy can actually be used in certain ways to protect the guilty companies by restructuring assets and striving to use one jurisdiction that is more helpful than another.
“No executive in the United States asbestos mining and manufacturing industry has ever been charged with a crime related to asbestos, despite an impressive record of knowledge and cover-up revealed since the 1970s in civil litigation,” writes Barry Castleman in Criminality and Asbestos in Industry.
In an article for the Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy Castleman details some attempts to charge those responsible in the USA. But the judges in these cases appeared to be on the side of the industry executives that were charged with willful and wanton endangerment.
The Strange Case of Schmidheiny
But I will detail a fascinating case from Italy described that sought to hold an owner responsible. Stephan Schmidheiny inherited Eternit, an asbestos-cement company with many mines and factories. Criminal charges were brought against Schmidheiny that resulted in a court case ending in 2011. Castleman writes, “In its eight hundred-page explanation of its verdict (‘‘Motivation’’), the appeal court found that Schmidheiny had directed a cover-up that delayed the ban of asbestos in Italy by ten years. The court concluded that Schmidheiny personally ordered a campaign of disinformation from 1976 on, in order to protect his fortune.”
“In reinventing himself as a ‘‘green’’ businessman in the 1990s, Stephan Schmidheiny created the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and began donating money to South American Conservation groups. He wrote several books saying business needed to conserve energy and manage resources sustainably, which was not yet a standard theme of corporate image advertizing. He was among the business leaders attending the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. There, the billionaire was able to find help in his rebranding effort.”
We’ll see more examples of this greenwashing elsewhere.
Further appeal to the Italian Supreme Court had this overturned in 2014, saying his was guilty but that the statute of limitations had passed.
The prosecutors didn’t give up. In May 2019, Schmidheiny was once again sentenced to jail for four years over the deaths of two workers that had no statute of limitations. This is being appealed and is the last update I could find.
EPA and OSHA Formed to Fight Asbestos
The EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, was formed in 1970. OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, was formed in 1971.
These were formed in part due to asbestos and the need to regulate it. The Clean Air Act of 1970 classified asbestos as an air pollutant. It gave the EPA the power to regulate use and disposal of asbestos. The Toxic Substances Control Act, in 1976, gave the EPA authority to place restrictions on certain chemicals including asbestos.
In 1986, the Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act had the EPA establish guidelines for removal of asbestos from schools.
In 1989, the EPA issued the Asbestos Ban and Phase-Out Rule. This aimed to fully ban the manufacturing, importing and sale of asbestos-containing products. However, the industry fought back. After appeal, Corrosion Proof Fittings v. Environmental Protection Agency, overturned the ban in 1991.
The Asbestos Information Association (AIA) was formed by the industry. The director was Matthew Swetonic, who explained what they were able to accomplish in fighting against these regulations. “I think it is a gauge of the effectiveness of the total industry involvement in this most crucial matter that of eleven main requirements in the [OSHA] standards, the industry position was accepted totally by OSHA on nine of the eleven, about fifty percent on a tenth, and totally rejected on only one. The struggle is far from over. We must not only continue but indeed expand our activities and the various areas of concern.”
More attempts were introduced to complete ban asbestos. Such as the Ban Asbestos in American Act in 2002. In 2007, this bill passed the Senate but not the House.
The United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and all of the European Union, at least 50 countries in total, have all banned asbestos use. The United States has not.
Use has gone way down, but it is still used in certain applications. In 2018, 750 metric tons were imported into the US. An estimated 10,000 people per year die in the United States from asbestos related disease.
A report from the WHO in 2018 found that about 125 million people in the world were exposed to asbestos in the workplace. And a whopping half of all deaths from occupational cancer come about because of asbestos.
Hill & Knowlton Strikes Again
Would it surprise you at all to learn that the asbestos industry worked with the PR Firm, Hill & Knowlton (H&K) the principle party behind Big Tobacco’s initiative to control the scientific debate?
In 1968, T&N had a five-point plan from H&K that stated in capital letters, “NEVER BE THE FIRST TO RAISE THE HEALTH QUESTION.” The points including emphasizing rarity and stressing the safety controls were effective.
Another front organization (are you keeping track of all these?) the Asbestos Information Centre shared offices with H&K. Again, just like the TIRC did.
In the early 1980’s U.S. Gypsum Company hired H&K to help with public schools seeking compensation for removal of asbestos. More companies joined with the firm, forming an industry coalition to face the threat together.
H&K’s strategy involved forming a “third-party panel of independent experts to be available for testimony, commentary and technical support in appropriate markets and forums.”
They also said, “the spread of media coverage must be stopped at the local level and as soon as possible.”
It was yet another Scientific Advisory Board. While the experts would be “independent” the funding would come from the industry itself.
In 1984, H&K formed the Safe Buildings Alliance (SBA) which could “could also act to deflect attention away from affected companies” and “take the heat from activist industry critics.” A court later found that “Due to the financial and operational control that the [asbestos manufacturers] exercise over the SBA, the SBA is merely the alter ego of the [asbestos manufacturers].”
Sounds quite similar to the National Smokers’ Alliance or Center for Indoor Air Research, run by Big Tobacco’s PR firms to me.
Big Names and Politicians On Your Side
A memo between two asbestos plant managers were noted as saying, “In tackling a problem of this nature [mesothelioma] one should either be completely frank with everyone or maintain complete secrecy – it is the latter that [Professor Archie Cochrane, director of epidemiology at the Medical Research Council] feels is best at the moment.”
A leader of public health and science was telling them to keep silent on the dangers. This was the man by which the Cochrane Collaboration was named. He is considered one of the fathers of clinical epidemiology and evidence-based medicine.
If he could be swayed to take the industry’s side, is any science safe at all?
In the UK, member of Parliament Cyril Smith, was also shareholder in one of the big three, T&N. Regarding regulation by the government, he had at least one speech he delivered in the House, drafted by T&N.
And it turns out Smith was also a serial child sexual abuser which came to light much later. If you’re willing to abuse children, taking money from an industry and lying about it is not nearly as bad, right? Why wouldn’t you do that if you’re committing much greater crimes? After all it would help you to accumulate money and power which would be useful in being able to abuse more, while getting away with it.
We’ll unfortunately see examples of pedophile politicians come up again.
Conclusion
Of course, there are far more details available. I’ve tried to cover in a single chapter what it took me twenty chapters to do with Big Tobacco. And this pattern will mostly continue. It was a brief overview, showing just a few of the specifics involved in a century long industry.
The big picture I hope you can see is that it was almost exactly the same playbook in use, including one of the exact same players involved, Hill & Knowlton.
In the next chapter we look at the problems of asbestos in one of the world’s most famous products and the lies and coverup involved.
Key Takeaways on The Asbestos Industry
- Internal science from as early as the 1920’s was showing that asbestos was dangerous. The industry covered this up.
- As public science came out showing the dangers, the industry went on the defensive smearing and attacking such scientists.
- The industry hired PR Firms, including Hill & Knowlton to basically run the exact same PR strategy as Big Tobacco did.
- The EPA and OSHA were both created in part to offer protection against asbestos. Their powers were influenced by the industry even from early on. Front organizations were successful in stalling the scientific truth and keeping regulations, such as those from OSHA, at bay.
- Litigation bankrupted some of the smaller companies, but many of the bigger one’s continued to thrive by utilizing bankruptcy loopholes or going more worldwide. No executive was held liable except possibly one in Italy where ongoing court cases are still occurring from events that occurred in the 80’s.
- Despite the near unanimous recognition of asbestos dangers at any level, it is still produced in many countries and only banned in some.
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Links to all published chapters of The Industry Playbook can be found here.
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Great article Logan…Many other industries doing the the same thing being assisted by our crooked government…(aspertame and HFCS are 2 of them)….
nice write up.
Like you said this stuff is still being imported and I have no clue how. Even worse is how much of this stuff is still lurking in buildings from many years ago.