Reverend Jim Jones is remembered for orchestrating the largest mass suicide in recorded history. On Nov. 18, 1978, faithful members of the People's Temple church gathered in the Jonestown meeting hall, deep in the jungles of Guyana, to receive their paper-cup's worth of grape-flavored punch. Then slowly, one by one, members of the "flock" sank to the floor. By the following morning, Jones and 913 of his disciples were dead.
From the Jonestown Massacre arose entire cottage industries devoted to cult psychology, CIA conspiracy theories and secret mind-control experiments gone awry. More importantly, however, the tragedy exposed the dangers of the global pesticide industry, which had steadily cultivated the developing world's agricultural boom under little government oversight. Consequent widespread availability of hazardous toxins meant that anyone -- farmer or fool -- had their pick of poisons. Jones' final recipe, for example, called for a hefty dose of potassium cyanide mixed with his usual favorite -- purple Flavor Aid.
Soon after Jonestown, the World Health Organization took a closer look at suicide rates and pesticide use. They discovered an unsettling trend -- while a 1973 WHO Technical Report had recorded only a few thousand cases of self-inflicted pesticide poisonings, this statistic had risen dramatically by 1985, with over 3 million non-fatal poisonings and 220,000 suicides occurring each year. Realizing that something had to be done, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization produced a set of guidelines for industrial pesticide companies, in the hopes of checking this pandemic felo-de-se.
These same FAO guidelines remain in place. By design, however, they lack the force of law and offer only "voluntary standards of conduct for public and private entities engaged in ... the distribution and use of pesticides, particularly where there is ... inadequate national law to regulate pesticides." Revised again in 2002, they have been flagrantly ignored by corporations and governments alike for nearly 20 years.
Meanwhile, pesticides continue to trickle down throats of the desperate and poor. Rural India, for instance, made headlines last spring when a Lancet study announced that the southern city of Vellore had the highest teenage suicide rate in the world (148 per 100,000 residents, more than 10 times the average in the United States), facilitated in part by the region's generous supply of insecticides. Similar figures have been reported for Sri Lanka, Hong Kong and Taiwan. A study published in the December 2003 issue of the International Journal of Epidemiology estimates that nearly 300,000 pesticide-related suicides occur in China and Southeast Asia alone, with millions more suffering related injuries. Data are lacking for other developing countries, particularly those in Africa, but are likely to be comparable wherever pesticides are amply cheap and ready to drink.
Moreover, given the ballooning incidence and burden of mental illnesses, today's suicide problem is arguably a pale shadow of what lies ahead -- and all the more reason why better suicide-prevention strategies are needed now. Pesticides and psychosis don't mix, a point driven home by Reverend Jones himself. Short of prescribing a few billion or so pills of Paxil, a few improvements are immediately obvious: encourage tighter import restrictions, require licenses for pesticide purchase and sale and institute price floors, for starters.
Perhaps the most promising idea is the creation of a "Minimum Pesticides List," first proposed in 2002 by a leading group of pathologists and toxicologists in the October issue of The Lancet. The idea builds upon the characteristic WHO approach of working with local physicians to gradually eliminate and eventually ban certain dangerous chemical agents, but it goes further to construct a flexible menu of approved pesticides from which countries can pick and choose to suit their agricultural needs.
As noted in the original proposal, "Unbiased assessment and comparison of pesticides, using an explicit and transparent evidence-based approach, would be very useful for governments and small-scale farmers. ... A model list would allow legislators to decide which few pesticides should be used in their region and then actively register them; other pesticides would not be registered, removing a large number of obsolete and dangerous pesticides from circulation."
The concept is the same in principle as the WHO Essential Drugs List. By prioritizing which drugs a population needs most, it has helped ensure the broadest and most effective dispensation of medications. Similar benefits would accrue with analogous constraints on pesticide choice.
To date, however, nothing has come of the Minimum Pesticides List. Rivers of poison still flow from north to south, drowning the downtrodden and leaving broken lives in its wake. Sadly, it seems the captivating incomprehensibility of Jonestown still lingers with us today, in more subtle ways than we are willing to admit.
Jason Lott is a first-year student in the School of Medicine from Anniston, Ala. Whole Lotta Love appears on Mondays.
