A President Who Cared

While rustling through a box of old papers last night looking for something else, up popped a surprise — a copy of “The White House Magazine Summary” for Feb. 4, 1977. And there on the third page was a summary of my article in Rolling Stone that week called “For Export Only: Poisons and Dangerous Drugs.”

I’m fairly certain this was the only time something I wrote made it onto a reading list in the Oval Office. Of course, those were very different times. Jimmy Carter was President, a man with moral fiber who cared about issues like the export of banned and restricted products.

And while he was in office he tried to do something about it.

The article in question was one of my last in the magazine but only one of many on the topic I wrote over the course of several years. Most were short wire service pieces for Pacific News Service, a small independent operation headquartered in San Francisco.

The reporting in all of these articles fed into a longer article we eventually produced at the Center for Investigative Reporting as part of a package called “The Corporate Crime of the Century” in Mother Jones. That package won the National Magazine Award.

Finally, a decade of work by me and others culminated in a book, “Circle of Poison,” I co-authored with CIR colleague Mark Schapiro.

By then, activists the world over were working on the issue of banned substances exported by rich countries to the underdeveloped parts of the planet. There were policies being developed by governments all over the place following Jimmy Carter’s example.

In the eyes of many overseas we were the good guys.

I miss those days.

See also: “A President Who Rocked”

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