The escalating crime rates in the United States are due to the criminals’ propensity to ingest lead during their formative years.
The laughable newstory to which we link is about a ditsy study where the omniscient researchers draw a direct relationship between how much lead there is in a child’s blood and future criminal behavior. Although lead has been vigorously eliminated from human contact for many years the whiff of a lawsuit can always be relied upon to get the creative juices of grifters flowing by resurrecting the banished metal. This time they found, by studying a sample of 250 people in the Cincinnati area, that the more lead in a child’s blood from birth to seven years of age the more likely that child was to be arrested upon reaching adulthood. The tie, moreover, between high lead and violent crime is particularly strong.
"We need to be thinking about lead as a drug and a fairly strong one," says the principle investigator for this study. "These kids have been exposed to this drug, chronically, since before birth."
To most people except researchers with an agenda, lead is a metal, not a drug. Precision, of course, is never a characteristic common to the merry bands of researchers whose need to "publish or perish" overrides any concern with whether what they publish is useful or even very interesting. This story in USA Today omits any revelation as to what relative risk of lawless behavior might be attached to childhood munching on lead, which most likely means it was extremely small. So absent that nugget we’ll offer an observation that can be made by anyone with a memory and a brain.
Never mind failings such as the study’s extremely small sample size. Concentrate on the researchers’ failure to explain the lack of social deviancy in those who grew up as children prior to the late 1970’s. Those children were exposed to much more lead and presumably had higher bloodstream lead levels than those in this particular study yet society had much less criminal activity when lead was ubiquitous than during the era of no lead.
We’ll admit the preceding paragraph was not a study but then neither can these researchers’ effort be so described. With a racially-tinged nod to living conditions in poorer locations, the researchers hit all the hot buttons; race, class and expensive remediation.
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