luddites add chemistry to their arsenal

Are you terrified that everything around you has deadly poisons just waiting to kill you? Do you insist that every package of food you buy is certified organic, antibiotic free, and eco-friendly? Well then you’ve probably found a video that speaks loudly and clearly to your fears, a performance piece from filmmaker Annie Leonard. Linked to and cited by just about every site that promotes a pathological fear of anything and everything that contains a chemical those of us without an education in chemistry can’t readily identify, it’s one long ad in support of a bill that would regulate cosmetics and toiletries as strictly as drugs. To explain exactly why this is a really bad idea based on nothing more than scaremongering and ignorance, attorney Lee Doren made a terrific rebuttal in video form, dissecting Leonard’s claims with a merciless application of good science and cold, hard logic.

Again, notice how Anne introduces complex chemical names in the video. Instead of trying to find out what the substances she quotes from the ingredient list are, why they’re there, and what they do, she asks a rhetorical question and dives straight into vilifying cosmetics makers for “pumping toxins” into their products while she haughtily educates chemists that it’s important not to kill their customers with poisonous products. Maybe I’ve missed something, but I was pretty sure that chemists are rather well aware of the that fact. Also, note that as we’re being bombarded with scaremongering about lead, mercury and petrochemicals, Anne does just about everything she can not to name the actual quantities of these chemicals found in her body, and implied to be present in ours. You see, if you get to the parts per million level and you’ll find uranium in human tissues too. Does this mean evil corporations are putting uranium into anything and everything? Of course not. Uranium is billions of years old and it’s always around us. Eliminating it completely is an impossible task.

So what if we went by Anne’s advice and instituted a law requiring companies to either perform an impossible task, or have their products yanked because someone who doesn’t understand that a human body isn’t going to be harmed by a few micrograms of a substance that would have to be present in concentrations about two or three orders of magnitude to actually become toxic, panics because he sees a chemical name he can’t be bothered to look up? Why we would need to ban everything in the name of safety! Even the most organic and free range poultry is still going to pick up something that you could say to be toxic just by breathing the air. It’s not only ridiculous overkill, but it’s an overkill born from Luddism and with no consideration for the science on the subject. We live in a world of chemicals and when we get right down to it, everything has a scary chemical name. When intellectually lazy and politically overzealous demagogues like Leonard valiantly try to save us all from boogeymen they made up, scared of a chemical name they can’t decode, and instantly assuming that if they don’t know what it is right away, it must be just slightly less harmful than nerve gas, we need to introduce science into the discussion rather than simply let them scare the public into pressing lawmakers to adopt an ill-thought out and needless law born of paranoia and very misguided good intentions.