I received lots of mail about last Thursday's column on the controversy over the Hopkins experiment with an organic fertilizer to arrest lead in the soil around nine East Baltimore homes. One of the most important points was made in a letter from Michael T. Martin, a research analyst with the Arizona School Boards Association in Phoenix. Those who condemn the Hopkins effort to help protect poor, black children from lead poisoning need to consider Martin's points, missed in all the recent noise:

Even at blood lead levels below the federal standard (10
micrograms/deciliter) it is well established that lead poisoning results
in a loss of over seven I.Q. points, reduces stature by up to an inch,
causes learning disabilities, irritability, distractibility,
impulsiveness and aggression.

Irritability makes kids misbehave in angry and disruptive ways.
Impulsiveness makes kids act out behaviors instead of restraining them.
Aggression makes kids seem mean or hot-headed. Distractibility means
kids have difficulty concentrating or remaining on task. Schools that
serve lead-poisoned kids cannot make those symptoms go away and they
seriously interfere with attempts to educate even the nonpoisoned kids
in those schools. Doctors first found out about the
brain damage caused by lead poisoning when a follow-up study in 1943 of
twenty lead-poisoned children reported that all but one were school
failures.

Think for a minute about those typical symptoms of low-level lead
poisoning: irritability, impulsiveness and aggression. Doesn't it seem
likely that two adults with those symptoms would find it difficult to
live together? That adults with those symptoms might find it difficult
to hold a job? What if adults with those symptoms have a child with
those symptoms? One study found that abused children
were "twenty-fold" more likely to have high levels of lead poisoning.

You talk about East Baltimore being the location of lead poisoning and
"one of the most violent stretches of city territory" but did you know a
study in Philadelphia in 1990 determined that the best predictor of
violent crime at age 22 was blood lead levels at age seven? Rick Nevins published research showing a high correlation between lead exposure and violent crime in ten countries, including the U.S. (Another) study found that incarcerated juvenile delinquents have higher blood lead levels than a matched sample of non-adjudicated peers.

Lead poisoning is implicated in causing ADHD and the National Institute on Drug Abuse has concluded that the majority of drug abusers are ADHD sufferers self-medicating their symptoms because illegal drugs like cocaine act much like their pharmaceutical relatives
used to treat ADHD.

In other words, the "lack of jobs" and the "crime" and the "limited
academic achievements" and the "dysfunction of families" and the
"incarceration" and the drug abuse can all be exacerbated by lead
poisoning. The brain chemistry involved in lead poisoning is similar to
that in schizophrenia. The Kennedy Krieger Institute has even done some
of the crucial research on the brain damage caused by lead poisoning.

I have an online report posted in 2002 about how lead poisoning causes
failing schools at:
http://www.azsba.org/lead.htm

In my field, education, I constantly read about the 'failure' of
inner-city schools that are in these same lead poisoned neighborhoods.
People want high schools to make kids graduate in four years, but as you
noted, some of these kids get incarcerated or drug addicted or become
violent. People look at their own quiet suburban schools and wonder why
these inner-city schools can't be like them, but suburban schools don't
have any lead-poisoned kids. So they think it must be because "those"
people go to inner-city schools, "so what do you expect?". I think lead
poisoning contributes to racial tensions because people see minorities
as violent, aggressive, and ill-mannered, not knowing that these are
symptoms of lead poisoning.

I'm not saying that if you eliminate lead poisoning there will be no
crime, or no mental illness, or no family problems. What I have said in
the past is that these will become like lions and tigers and bears:
problems that are serious but manageable. But lead poisoning makes them
tyrannosaurs, problems beyond our ability to handle them simply because
they become so large and ferocious because of the brain damage that is
irreversible. Schizophrenia, for example, is not normally a violent
disorder, but lead poisoning causes schizophrenia-like symptoms as well
as violence and aggression.