From googling the first major study was released in 2000. Before that the connection to brain damage was known.
Was the connection to crime specifically discussed at all, even though it wasn’t proven?
I remember back in the 70s hearing on the news about lead paint in apartments and children were eating the paint. Then it has been on the news ever since. Most likely I was young and only just realizing and hearing about this sort of thing.
I remember hearing about it, especially in paint and pipes. There were a lot of people tearing out both these as the dangers became more well known.
Lead had been a known toxin since at least the Roman era. When Midgley and Kettering introduced tetraethyl lead as a fuel additive, it was already known to be acutely toxic. The plants that were set up to make TEL had numerous deaths due to lead poisoning. Midgley himself had to be treated for acute lead poisoning after stunts like washing his hands in TEL in front of the press so show how harmless it was. Why then was this known highly toxic substance allowed to be produced? It was deemed crucial for the war effort. It took until the mid 80s for it to be banned. Estimates hover around 7 million tons of lead was released into the atmosphere in the US alone. As an aside, Midgley was also he inventor of the first Cloroflorocarbons (CFCs, including freon) that would go on to create the hole in the ozone layer. He has been dubbed by some as “the single most destructive organism that has ever lived on earth.”
That’s kinda the point of my question, this was known on some level. But was there any discussion on the effect on crime specifically way back in the 1970s and 80s? They knew crime was out of control afaik and kept looking for reasons why. Was this discussed at all back then?
I must have consumed a lot of lead, because it took me a while to not read your title as containing a word rhyming with head.
read (reed) / read (red)
lead (lede) / lead (led)I was about to trot out the old “English needs diacritics argument” but then realised that “reade”, “readd”, “leade” and “leadd” would solve the problem the ways we usually do it.
I certainly didn’t hear about it before that study was released. We only worried about jabbing each other with graphite pencils 'cause “you’ll get lead poisoning!”
70s child here - we cleaned stuff in gasoline, washed our hands with it after getting greasy. My dad soaked charcoal briquets in it for 15 minutes and then dumped it all onto the pile of charcoal …threw a match. In the late 80s we started to hear all about the bad stuff. Oh yeah people either dumped their old motor oil down the storm drains or like my dad burying it in a hole in the yard. “Goes back to the earth that way son”.
Was everyones sense of smell just completely fried from all the cigarettes?
Basically yes
“It disperses into the local ground water and people’s wells and drinking water, son.”
The impossible dream of flamable drinking water eventually came true dad!
Wipes away tear
The social science college courses I took in the 80’s credited dropping crime rates to availability of abortion and birth control, not removal of lead from gasoline.
They’re all factors from what I’ve read.
I’m going to guess, yes.
What we did NOT have was a libertarian media push to make all social problems have simple and cheap solutions that don’t require changing the fundamental relationship between government and capitalism, in which these little factoids play prominent roles.
Not specifically, no. That lead was toxic, and could lead to at least some health problems was well known by then, but it took years of studies to pinpoint precisely what those effects were, and those studies came out in the following years, including the one you’re referring to.
Not from what I remember. Lead was taken out and we knew it was bad but I don’t recall people being like. we have a whole generations that effectively had brain damage. Man lead pipes since 1800 and then gas and paint from 1920 till the 70’s. kinda crazy.
