A President Who Rocked

One of the major pieces I published in Rolling Stone was also one of my first in-depth efforts to document the global trade in banned drugs and chemicals.

Not exactly what you’d expect from a Rock ‘n Roll magazine, perhaps.

It was called “For Export Only” and it was summarized like this: “What do the multimillion-dollar U.S. pesticide and drug industries do when government agencies ban the use of their products? They find new markets in underdeveloped countries.”

The article appeared in the magazine’s February 10, 1977 issue, which had Peter Frampton featured on the cover as “The Rock Star of the Year” in a profile written by 19-year-old Cameron Crowe.

In those years, long before email, laptops or cellphones, the way we got feedback on our articles was through the mail. And usually there was a lot — we got hundreds of letters, for example, in response to our Patty Hearst stories.

By contrast, I only got one letter in response to “For Export Only.’ Yet it had an intriguing return address — 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in Washington, D.C.

It was from a staff member to President Jimmy Carter indicating that my article had been included in his weekly briefing on new policy issues.

More significantly, Carter had decided to form an interagency task force to study the banned exports issue. Eventually he issued an executive order that for the first time in U.S. history restricted the trade in banned and restricted goods overseas.

This was a major policy victory on what until then had been an obscure issue few knew or cared about. Soon after the article appeared, I left Rolling Stone and co-founded the Center for Investigative Reporting, where one of our big early projects was the book I co-authored with Mark Schapiro on the same topic, “Circle of Poison: Pesticides and People in a Hungry World.”

That book helped launch a global movement to stem the tide of restricted hazards flowing around the globe — a movement that continues in many forms and many places to this day.

But Jimmy Carter was the first political leader to denounce the immorality of rich countries dumping dangerous goods in poor countries where regulatory structures are weak, causing heavy damage to human health and the environment.

Jimmy Carter was many things — a peanut farmer, politician, humanitarian, policy wonk, avid reader, big-time fan of rock music, but I’ll always remember him as the only person in power who recognized the ground-breaking potential of that seminal piece I published in Rolling Stone — and tried to fix it.