What accounts for the downturn in crime in New York City in the last half of the 1990s? Economist Rick Nevin has a short answer: Lead. That is, reducing the number of toddlers who have lead poisoning leads to fewer criminals when these kids come of age.

What makes Nevin’s work persuasive is that he has shown an identical, decades-long association between lead poisoning and crime rates in nine countries.

“It is stunning how strong the association is,” Nevin said in an interview. “Sixty-five to ninety percent or more of the substantial variation in violent crime in all these countries was explained by lead.”

Lead levels in old housing is one source that has come under better control, particularly in cities such as New York that have attacked the problem aggressively, especially in poor neighborhoods. But lead in gasoline is another huge factor. In the US, lead in gasoline peaked in the early 70s and then started to decline, falling very sharply in the early 80s; it was nearly eliminated by 1987. In New York, lead levels plummeted in the early 1970s. The impact? Data show that between 1970 and 1974, the number of children heavily poisoned by lead fell by 80%. Fast-forward twenty years, and you have a plummeting crime rate. By contrast, in countries that have been behind the US in putting constraints in leaded gasoline, crime rates are soaring.

Other research that supports the lead-crime connection is out there but has garnered little attention:

Other evidence has accumulated in recent years that lead is a neurotoxin that causes impulsivity and aggression, but these studies have also drawn little attention. In 2001, sociologist Paul B. Stretesky and criminologist Michael Lynch showed that U.S. counties with high lead levels had four times the murder rate of counties with low lead levels, after controlling for multiple environmental and socioeconomic factors.

In 2002, Herbert Needleman, a psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh, compared lead levels of 194 adolescents arrested in Pittsburgh with lead levels of 146 high school adolescents: The arrested youths had lead levels that were four times higher.

Wow.

Naturally, I’ll now segue to the need to keep lead out of kids’ toys and gear. Granted, occasionally playing with a toy made with lead paint may not put a kid in danger of serious lead poisoning (unless he swallows it), but if we keep letting crappy lead toys and kids’ jewelry into the country, who knows what the cumulative effect could be? Why should we let foreign factory owners and careless importers undo what de-leading efforts have accomplished in the US? Let’s get the word out to the acting chair of the CPSC that we want our government to take a harder line against importers of lead-containing children’s gear.

Posted by MommaSteph.