Published in the Asbury Park Press
By DOUG ROBERTSON
CORRESPONDENT
DOVER TOWNSHIP The type of legal war attorney Jan Schlichtmann waged for Massachusetts cancer victims, made famous in the best-selling book and film "A Civil Action," will not work for families who want the truth about and solutions to the possible cancer cluster here, he said.
Schlichtmann told an audience Ocean County College last night that community cooperation, and not litigation, is the answer.
"If we want to shrink this tumor we need to expose it to the bright light of day, and that is community," he said. "We will know what has happened. We will figure it out, but we must work together. That is the only way."
Schlichtmann is one of several attorneys hired by Toxic Environments Affect Children's Health, a group of approximately 60 township families with children who have been stricken with cancer.
The group is now involved in an 18-month partnership between state and federal agencies, Ciba Speciality Chemical Corp., Union Carbide Corp, and United Water Toms River, whereby all parties have forgone lawsuits in favor of an open sharing of all informantion related to the possibility that cancer-causing chemicals have seeped into the township's drinking water.
Schlichtmann compared his experience the Woburn, Mass., cancer case to a war a war over chemicals invading the bodies of children that had camps of attorneys and small armies marching into court, scientists marching into pits in search of toxins, and where the truth was viewed as both a prize and a weapon.
But over the course of it, "something happened to me," Schlichtmann said. "The Woburn families took me on a journey where at the end I came to understand a new way of looking at the world and looking at the truth. I learned the importance between truth and life itself. The connection between truth and life."
Schlichtmann said it will be a spirit of community, not the courts, and an open sharing of the truth that will find the cause and solution to the cancer cluster here.
He said he learned from the Woburn experience that the courts cannot solve the type of community health problem the township is facing. "That place (the courtroom) is a bad place because it is based on a flawed premise that conflict will resolve conflict. It doesn't. In the entire history of the world it never has. When you meet conflict with conflict it creates more conflict."
He said with community cooperation will make the problem smaller, not bigger, and see it solved quicker.
"The biggest obstacle is getting everyone involved to be open and truthful," said TEACH member Bruce Anderson, whose 17-year-old son has been diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia since he was 10. "The truth can be distorted or downplayed by entities who would like it just to go away and be swept under the rug," he said.
Schlichtmann said the partnership between TEACH and the chemical manufacturers that contaminated sites here is encouraging, because the sharing of information that has already taken place would not have happened if they started by fighting in court.
"Communication is needed to open people's eyes and ears," said Monica Vermeulen, president of the Phi Theta Kappa Society at OCC and mother of an 11-year-old daughter diagnosed with cancer. "Untill you sit with a child in your arms who could possibly be dying with cancer, you just don't know. They need to be made aware before it hits their home."
Source: Asbury Park Press
Published: April 23, 1999
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