An Asbestos Primer

On May 11, 2006, insulation manufacturer Owens Corning announced a $5.2 billion settlement with victims of asbestos-related illnesses, thus erasing a major portion of the company’s liability and allowing it to emerge intact from Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings. John D. Cooney--one of the partners at Cooney and Conway, the law firm where I push papers for a living--was quoted in the Reuters and Associated Press articles on the subject. In honor of this event, and as further proof that They will never give a damn about the monad on the ground, here is a brief history of asbestos—a mineral that, through the mad convolutions of fate, is putting food on the tables of DJ Screw and myself as we speak.

*LINK to article in Boston Globe*

The history of asbestos stretches back beyond the age of antiquity, but its present name originated with the ancient Greeks (the word means “inextinguishable” or “indestructible”—shall we say “all things are an exchange for fire, except asbestos”?) Due to its toughness and resistance to flame, the fibrous mineral was involved in many aspects of Greek and Roman daily life; Roman restaurants used tablecloths made of asbestos, which they cleaned by throwing in fires. Upon observing asbestos’s “wonder material” properties, Roman historian Pliny the Elder claimed that it “afforded protection against all spells, particularly those of the Magi.” Pliny also noted that the slaves who actually produced asbestos tablecloths, clothing, etc. suffered a “sickness of the lungs.” This observation would, of course, be fleshed out later on in history.

Fast forward to the end of the 19^th century, when manufacturers in the United States began to use asbestos in a wide array of building and insulation materials. Since asbestos-related illnesses usually take at least 15 years to manifest themselves, the first officially recorded asbestos-related death did not occur until 1906, when an asbestos worker perished due to pulmonary fibrosis (a condition in which air sacs in the lungs are replaced by scar tissue that prevents the effective transfer of oxygen into the bloodstream).

Over the course of the first half of the 20^th century, knowledge of the health risks associated with asbestos spread rapidly among insurance companies and asbestos manufacturers. In 1918, a Prudential official stated that life insurance companies would not cover asbestos workers due to the unnaturally high rate of death associated with exposure to the mineral. By the 1930’s and ‘40’s, insurance company doctors were regularly reporting on the severe dangers posed by inhalation of asbestos dust, and major asbestos manufacturers like Johns-Manville agreed to sponsor studies on the links between asbestos and certain types of lung disease. But the companies also insisted on complete control over the publishing of the results. It’s not difficult to guess whether Johns-Manville and their ilk ever went public with any studies linking asbestos inhalation with various forms of lung cancer.

Circumstances went south in earnest for the asbestos manufacturers in 1964, when Dr. Irving Selikoff published a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association demonstrating that, in many cases, exposure to asbestos dust causes asbestosis (a form of pulmonary fibrosis), lung cancer, and mesothelioma (a form of cancer that attacks the cells lining the lungs, and that usually leads to death within 6 to 12 months of the onset of symptoms). In the early 1970’s, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration began to regulate the use of asbestos in industry, and in that period the first verdict in favor of a plaintiff in an asbestos lawsuit was awarded to Clarence Borel in Texas—the damages in that case totaled $79,436.24. The final blow to the major asbestos manufacturers came in the late 1970’s, when former company officials offered testimony and produced internal memos and other documents that exposed the massive cover-up perpetrated earlier in the century.

Since then, asbestos litigation has itself become a stupendously profitable industry, enriching hordes of trial lawyers to the distaste of many and serving as a petri dish for several varieties of sleaze: doctors fraudulently diagnosing workers with asbestos-related illnesses, unions steering their workers to asbestos law firms in exchange for a cut of jury prizes, and asbestos attorneys coaching their clients on how to testify. As a result, a whopping 6 per cent of all court filings in the U.S. since the 1970’s have been related to asbestos (thanks for the info, Wiki-devils).

The massive buildup of asbestos litigation in U.S. courts led to proposal of the FAIR (Fairness in Asbestos Injury Resolution) Act in Congress, which failed to pass the Senate this past February by one vote. The law would have established a $140 billion trust fund paid for by all the asbestos manufacturers vulnerable to lawsuits, thus relieving them of their liability and effectively ending asbestos litigation. Although Senator Bill Frist has claimed there is still a possibility of reconsidering the FAIR Act before the end of the year, many see Thursday’s settlement announcement by Owens Corning as an indicator that the big asbestos companies have lost faith that the law will make it out of the Senate.

Yet amid the outcry against asbestos litigation, no one should forget that the havoc it has wreaked on our court system is merely the symptom of an underlying spiritual disease in our culture, and one that shows no signs of abating—the tendency to excessive calculation of all things, especially life, and the foisting of expense and sacrifice upon those who have few means of escaping either. The tacit contempt displayed by asbestos manufacturers toward their employees in the first half of the 20^th century is certainly one of the most terrible expressions of this impiety, causing as it did upwards of 200,000 deaths in the United States, as well as exemplifying what Heidegger's girlfriend Hannah Arendt called the "banality of evil": the concealment of a community's violence beneath the phenomenological cloak of everyday actions like consumption, production and trade.

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos

http://www.healthdangers.com/toxic-substances/asbestos/history-of-asbestos.htm

http://environmentalchemistry.com/yogi/environmental/asbestoshistory2004.html

http://www.asbestosresource.com/history/

www.kazanlaw.com/profile/asbestoslit.cfm

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/000118.htm