The popcorn lung case study: a recipe for regulation?

Highway 71 runs straight down from the Canadian border to a place just seventy-five miles north of the Gulf of Mexico, and almost exactly in the middle of that road, almost exactly in the middle of the country, and at the heart of this story, sits the small town of Jasper, Missouri. Home to just over one thousand people, Jasper is also the location of a factory owned by the Gilster-Mary Lee Corporation. Its product is microwaveable popcorn. In the late 1990s, workers at the factory began getting unusually sick. After about a year and a half on the job, some of them developed what they thought was asthma, or a very bad cold, or maybe influenza. Eventually, Dr. Allen Parmet diagnosed one after another of them with a rare and irreversible disease: bronchiolitis obliterans. Though questions of causation can rarely be answered with absolute certainty, many scientists believe that the chemical which gives popcorn its buttery flavordiacetylis the reason for the workers' illness. This paper is intended to provide an overview of what has happened over the past decade in response to a condition now commonly known as "popcorn lung." The case study will proceed in chronological order, outlining the symptoms of the disease, the science surrounding diacetyl, and attempts to regulate the chemical through administrative action, litigation, and legislation. Next, the article will analyze the various regulatory vectors to arrive at three core conclusions: (1) the media may wield the greatest ability to compel regulation, (2) "regulation by litigation" has both direct and indirect force, and (3) tort reform may be necessary in light of the civil justice system's imperfect response to even minor toxic tort situations. No tale of toxic harms has ever had a happy ending, but perhaps the story of popcorn lung can teach us something about the regulation of toxins that will help us deal more effectively with similar public health crises in the future.