Tracking the Toxic Pipeline

By bizadmin
December 10, 2007 11:38 AM

Walt Bogdanich and Jake Hooker write about their investigative process in this special tribute to their Barlett & Steele award-winning piece “A Toxic Pipeline.” In their own words, it is the story of how two determined reporters traced a poisonous ingredient to uncover the truth.

In the fall of 2006, as Panamanians were dying in droves from counterfeit cold medicine, Walt Bogdanich looked on with one overriding thought: this epidemic looked disturbingly familiar. Ten years earlier, he had reported on a similar poisoning in Haiti where at least 88 children died from counterfeit fever medicine. In that case, the poisonous ingredient was traced to China, but the government there blocked any further investigation.  No one was ever charged, much less punished.

Bogdanich told his editor, Matt Purdy, that he wanted to investigate the Panama deaths.  He had a hunch that China might be involved, just as it was a decade earlier in Haiti.  If true, tracing the poison back to its manufacturer might give readers a chilling insight into how counterfeiters operate in a globalized economy, while shining a light on China’s role as a major supplier of fake drug ingredients. This was not a case of lifestyle drugs that didn’t work. This was poison. Moreover, counterfeit medicine with the same poison – diethylene glycol, an industrial solvent used in some antifreeze – had caused similar epidemics around the world. Who would do such a thing? And why did regulators seem powerless to stop it?  

Reporting in Panama was not without its challenges. Bogdanich had never visited the country, had no sources there and spoke no Spanish. In addition, government officials were embarrassed about their role in distributing the lethal cold medicine and were reluctant to discuss the case.

The first step was to find a reliable translator in Panama -- a task that proved more difficult than Bogdanich had imagined.  On one occasion, a translator refused to ask a question because it might provoke an angry response. As a backup, Bogdanich taped his interviews so he could verify the accuracy of those translations. No problems were found, and his local translator ended up providing invaluable help in finding key players in the still unfolding drama.

With so many rumors floating around Panama, Bogdanich wanted shipping and sales records to document precisely how the poison moved from manufacturer to patient.  He eventually got the records -- from non-governmental sources -- and they confirmed his suspicions:  the Panama poison had indeed come from China, passing through a toxic pipeline that stretched across three continents. As was the case in Haiti, the poison had been falsely labeled and exported by a trading company owned by the Chinese government. In both cases, traders outside of China sold and resold the lethal ingredients without verifying that the products were safe.
 
Bogdanich also reached out to a United States government source with the hope of finding Federal Drug Administration records, now 10 years old, documenting that agency’s futile effort on behalf of Haiti to identify the manufacturer of the earlier poison.  He did not file a Freedom of Information request, knowing from experience that any response would most likely be incomplete and might take months, if not years. To his surprise, his source had copies of the F.D.A.’s entire Haiti file. Those records would provide the backbone of a separate article that examined other mass poisonings involving medicine with diethylene glycol. Bogdanich also interviewed people from Bangladesh, India, Nigeria, Argentina, Haiti, England and Spain.

Bogdanich asked his colleague in the paper’s Beijing bureau, Jake Hooker, to find out all he could about the manufacturer. How did the poison slip into the drug supply? Was the Chinese government aware of the situation? Was the manufacturer certified to sell pharmaceutical ingredients?

A Chinese colleague told Hooker to “start from the bottom and work up to the top.” At the bottom are ordinary people. At the top are government officials. Working top down never works, because if you do that the government often gets to the bottom first -- and the bottom disappears.

Hooker made four trips to the small town of Hengxiang in the Yangtze delta where the factory was located. On his first visit in December, he wondered how he would be received at the factory. Fortunately, Chinese have a tradition of hospitality. It is rare, if one shows up at someone’s home, or at someone’s office, or at the gate of someone’s factory, to be turned away. Hooker was not turned away that morning, and he was not turned away months later, at the farmhouse of a former factory salesman.

Outside the factory, he talked to truckers, to farmers living beside the factory, to the owner of a chemical factory across the street, to salesmen and to people playing mahjongg in a roadside parlor. Some people opened up to him because Hooker spoke Chinese and he treated them with courtesy.

When inquiring about the deaths in Panama, Hooker did not suggest he knew who was to blame. He did not go to this small town as a prosecutor or a judge. He went there as a student of the chemical industry and the regulatory system that governs it.

Reading Chinese opened up public records. For example, companies must file reports with the local branch of the State Administration of Industry and Commerce, and these reports have names and addresses of employees, a list of licensed products, and annual inspections from regulatory agencies. Chemical plants must also declare the main ingredients they use to make their products, as part of environmental assessments.

There are vast stores of information in the Chinese language on the Internet, which gave Hooker the expertise he needed to conduct interviews about a specialized industry. He quickly learned, for example, that the factory that sold the poisonous chemical was not certified to make pharmaceutical ingredients. 

Literacy in Chinese and understanding of society was critical to conducting useful interviews. Productive interviews with Chinese officials do not take place in government offices. They happen in hotels, in cafes, in restaurants, in living rooms. Government officials should never feel they are leaking information, so Hooker adopted the pose of an insider -- somebody who already knows. Confirmation of crucial information linking Chinese companies to the deaths in Panama came about in casual meetings with officials, where formal interviews failed.

Hooker did not gain the trust of officials overnight, so he had to rely on borrowed trust. Any reporter working in China knows the value of friends, and friends of friends, and relatives of friends, and colleagues of friends. Locals will tell you that China is a society governed by relationships, not laws. It takes years to develop those relationships and that trust, and with it comes a duty not to harm the people who help you.

During five months of reporting, Hooker often wondered how the lives of the people he had interviewed might change.  It is important to keep those people in mind and to be mindful of the profound impact your written words might have.

And in this case, the stories by Bogdanich and Hooker did indeed have a profound impact. Responding to the coverage in The New York Times, China reopened its investigation of the Panama poison case, revoking the manufacturer’s operating license. China also banned the use of diethylene glycol in toothpaste. And the stories contributed to rising international concern over the safety of many Chinese products.

Read: A Toxic Pipeline

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Copyright © 2007 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism