The People vs. Agent Orange – an Interview with Carol VanStrum

By Brian Bahouth

On Saturday, Nov. 15, at 2 pm, the Sierra Club will show the film The People vs. Agent Orange in the Yachats Commons building in Yachats. The film closely follows two activists who fight the chemical industry and demand justice for the gruesome legacy of dioxin-contaminated herbicides. Carol Van Strum and French-Vietnamese activist Tran To Nga are featured in the film. VanStrum lives in Five Rivers, Oregon and played a pivotal role in the citizen-led effort that ended the use of dioxin-contaminated herbicides in the United States. 

During the mid-1970s, Carol VanStrum didn’t have to go looking for the use of toxic chemicals. The chemicals came to her and her family. The U.S. Forest Service and Lincoln County sprayed it from helicopters and trucks in service to the logging industry and the clearing of brush along waterways and roads. 

“My children got sprayed directly, and the dog died and my children got really sick, and nobody would listen to us,” VanStrum said during a recent Zoom call. “And then the garden died, and then we had weird birth defects among all the poultry that hatched here with crossed beaks and feet on backwards and crooked wings. It was horrendous, and no one would listen to us. We went to the Forest Service. We went to the county. Everybody said, ‘Oh no, that stuff is just absolutely safe.’

“They were spraying a mixture of 2, 4-D and 2,4,5-T, which are the total ingredients of Agent Orange. I wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper, the News Times, that they printed just saying what happened here. 

“Because we were kind of new. We’d only been here for a year, and we didn’t know a lot of people, and suddenly everybody was getting hold of us saying, yes, the same thing happened to us, and giving even more horror stories. 

“The result was that the whole community here in Five Rivers wrote to the Forest Service [the U.S. Forest Service], and we were so naive. We thought, if we just tell them what’s happening they’ll stop. That didn’t work.

“Anyway, we did write. Everybody told what happened to them, and the Forest Service refused to do anything. They insisted everything they were doing was safe, so we sued them.”

VanStrum said they didn’t realize how difficult it is to sue the federal government, but they found a lawyer in Eugene who was willing to take the case.

“We found Bruce Anderson in Eugene who took us on with the agreement that we would do all the research, and he would make his fees only half of what he usually charged. 

“So we had bake sales. We spent many, many hours. This is before the Internet. We spent many hours at the library at OHSU in Corvallis just doing the research that was needed, and then we were helped by contacting some of the scientists who had done the research, most of it done in Vietnam, where these same chemicals had been used horribly, and the result was we shut the Forest Service down. 

“The judge said, ‘No, you can’t do this. You’re not even considering the human health impacts.’”

As a result of winning that lawsuit, VanStrum heard from groups around the nation. Well before the advent of the Internet, they hand-collated information packets and mailed them to interested parties. One of those people, Bonnie Hill, lived a few miles away in the town of Alsea. 

Hill was an English teacher and volleyball coach who had a miscarriage soon after the nearby spraying of a dioxin-laden herbicide. Carol VanStrum recalled Bonnie Hill’s dogged and fastidious research.

“She read through all that stuff [in the information packet] and realized that she had had a miscarriage within a month of them spraying nearby. So she contacted other women that she knew in and around Alsea, including in Five Rivers, documenting as she went. She did an amazing job. 

“She went to the timber companies and got their records of where they sprayed and what they sprayed and what time, what day they sprayed. And then she went to the women who all had these miscarriages within a month or two of the spraying. [When she finished her investigation she] put together a dynamite letter to the EPA saying, ‘There’s a problem here. Please look into it.’ And that’s all she was asking. ‘Please look into it.’ 

“As a result of that, the EPA initiated something called the Alsea Study.”

For the Alsea Study, researchers examined herbicide spraying times and places and compared them to hospital records showing a spike in miscarriages in June and July, the months following peak application of the chemicals in March and April. That eight women, in a lightly populated area, had had thirteen miscarriages in a six-year period marked the first actionable evidence that dioxin presented a serious health threat to humans, though VanStrum points out that the Alsea Study has never been published in full.

In 1979, the study compelled EPA Deputy Administrator Barbara Blum to halt the use of dioxin-contaminated herbicides until researchers could better understand the implications for human health.

After pushback from Dow Chemical and Monsanto and much debate, the EPA ultimately banned the use of 2,4,5-T herbicide in the United States in 1985. Canada quickly followed suit. 

But dioxin has been banned since 1985, and this story is fifty years old—so why is the Sierra Club still screening the film The People vs. Agent Orange? 

VanStrum said that all the chemicals used in the forest and on lawns and golf courses and highway medians today were tested for toxicity by Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories, a company famous for faking toxicity results. Glyphosate (marketed under the brand name Roundup), Atrazine, and 2,4-D are all still widely used today and were all tested for toxicity by Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories. VanStrum doesn’t trust the results.

“It turned out they had been pumping out just fraudulent studies. Some of them were called ‘Magic Pencil’ studies. They just made it up. Others, they actually did the studies, but if half the rats died during an experiment, they just replaced them and said, ‘Oh, see, nobody was hurt.’ That’s the kind of thing they were doing. And [they were doing it] consistently over hundreds and hundreds of chemical products, pharmaceutical products, including a bunch of testing for the military.” 

VanStrum first published her book, A Bitter Fog, in 1983. The book was republished in 2021, and VanStrum said the book is still relevant. The skepticism that drove her research and lawsuits is an object lesson for people today, no matter the issue. 

“There are so many issues where you cannot just take at face value what you’re told. You need to find out whether it’s true or not. And the example is, you take your dead dog to the state and say, ‘Your poisons killed it.’ And first they say, ‘No, they didn’t. They’re absolutely safe, and that dog isn’t dead anyway.’

“That’s the kind of reaction that you get. Do you see what I mean? When it’s that glaring, you know there’s a problem, and I think people need to just start examining what they’re told, that’s all. And look for the scientists or whoever has the valid information and act on it. Especially with poisons. 

“When you look and see that they all end in ‘cide’—you know, pesticide, rodenticide, herbicide—they are all poisons. They kill. That ‘cide’ means kill, as in ‘homicide,’ and that’s what they all mean.

“They should never have been marketed. And if you couldn’t market something [if] you lied about it, none of those chemicals would be on the market today, none of them, because the only way they can sell them is to lie about it.”

The People vs. Agent Orange will be shown in the Yachats Commons building on Saturday, Nov. 15, 2025, at 2 p.m.