Why did this man drink DDT? The short answer: he's serious.
The longer answer is somewhat complicated. But let me take you through a thought experiment.
Three people: One is a Doctor; one is a Patient (terminally ill without the doctor's cure); and one is a Bureaucrat. The Bureaucrat forcibly interferes with the doctor administering a cure the patient clearly wants, so the Patient dies. Is the Bureaucrat partially responsible for the patient's death? Now, let's scale this example up to billions of people.
If you take all the wars and genocides of the 20th Century - combined - that number won't add up to how many people have died due to the ban on DDT. DDT, of course, was used to kill the mosquitoes that spread malaria. The U.S. and Europe used DDT to eradicate the disease in these countries by the 1960s. Speculative concerns (never proven) that the chemical might be thinning the eggshells of raptor birds were used to justify the ban. The EPA proceeded. World governments effectively banned DDT for the rest of the world, following suit. What came after has been nothing short of catastrophic.
Who is personally responsible for the ban? The EPA -- acting solely on hysteria created by Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring. In fact, the first major act of the (then) newly formed U.S. agency -- under the autocratic leadership of William Ruckelshaus -- was to ban the pesticide, evidently with no regard for the information in the Congressional hearings leading up to the ban. Despite some limited uses since 2006, there is tremendous pressure from the UN and other world governments to keep DDT off limits. European countries threaten countries who use DDT with trade restrictions.
I can think of no worse rights violation than the ban on DDT. If your conclusion from the thought experiment above is that the Bureaucrat is complicit in the Patient's death due to preventing the Doctor from administering the cure, you may also conclude that the EPA has a lot of deaths on its hands.
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