The Unforgivable Story of Lead — How Americans Lost One Billion IQ points

Short-term profit doesn’t care about long-term devastating effects — Will we ever learn from history?

Photo by Endri Killo on Unsplash

Knock Knock, let's put some poison in your car to stop that sound.

A little more than seventy-five years ago, General Motors, Du Pont and Standard Oil of New Jersey (Exxon) got together and put lead, a known poison, into gasoline.

For-profit.

The staggering result?

They diminished the IQ of half of the U.S population around 1988 with close to one billion IQ points.

To make this number more tangible;

• A 1985 EPA study estimated that as many as 5,000 Americans died annually from lead-related heart disease before the country’s lead phaseout (between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s)
• A total of about 68 million young children had toxic exposures to lead from gasoline from 1927 to 1987
• More than 54 per cent of Americans alive in 2015 had been exposed to dangerous levels of lead as children.
• Researchers estimate leaded gas has reduced the nation’s cumulative IQ score by 824 million points, nearly three points per person.