Research finds lead is the hidden villain behind violent crime, lower IQs, & even the ADHD epidemic
A small chunk of the US war budget could easily pay for the lead removal program proposed by this article.
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline?page=2
America's Real Criminal Element: Lead
New research finds Pb is the hidden villain behind violent crime, lower IQs, and even the ADHD epidemic. And fixing the problem is a lot cheaper than doing nothing.
—By Kevin Drum | January/February 2013 Issue
IF ECONOMETRIC STUDIES WERE ALL THERE were to the story of lead, you'd be justified in remaining skeptical no matter how good the statistics look. Even when researchers do their best—controlling for economic growth, welfare payments, race, income, education level, and everything else they can think of—it's always possible that something they haven't thought of is still lurking in the background. But there's another reason to take the lead hypothesis seriously, and it might be the most compelling one of all: Neurological research is demonstrating that lead's effects are even more appalling, more permanent, and appear at far lower levels than we ever thought. For starters, it turns out that childhood lead exposure at nearly any level can seriously and permanently reduce IQ. Blood lead levels are measured in micrograms per deciliter, and levels once believed safe—65 ?g/dL, then 25, then 15, then 10—are now known to cause serious damage. The EPA now says flatly that there is "no demonstrated safe concentration of lead in blood," and it turns out that even levels under 10 ?g/dL can reduce IQ by as much as seven points. An estimated 2.5 percent of children nationwide have lead levels above 5 ?g/dL.
High childhood exposure damages a part of the brain linked to aggression control and "executive functions." And the impact turns out to be greater among boys.
One set of scans found that lead exposure is linked to production of the brain's white matter—primarily a substance called myelin, which forms an insulating sheath around the connections between neurons. Lead exposure degrades both the formation and structure of myelin, and when this happens, says Kim Dietrich, one of the leaders of the imaging studies, "neurons are not communicating effectively." Put simply, the network connections within the brain become both slower and less coordinated.
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Everyone over the age of 40 was probably exposed to too much lead during childhood, and most of us suffered nothing more than a few points of IQ loss. But there were plenty of kids already on the margin, and millions of those kids were pushed over the edge from being merely slow or disruptive to becoming part of a nationwide epidemic of violent crime. Once you understand that, it all becomes blindingly obvious. Of course massive lead exposure among children of the postwar era led to larger numbers of violent criminals in the '60s and beyond. And of course when that lead was removed in the '70s and '80s, the children of that generation lost those artificially heightened violent tendencies.
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Wrong. As it turns out, tetraethyl lead is like a zombie that refuses to die. Our cars may be lead-free today, but they spent more than 50 years spewing lead from their tailpipes, and all that lead had to go somewhere. And it did: It settled permanently into the soil that we walk on, grow our food in, and let our kids play around.
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It's difficult to put firm numbers to the costs and benefits of lead abatement. But for a rough idea, let's start with the two biggest costs. Nevin estimates that there are perhaps 16 million pre-1960 houses with lead-painted windows, and replacing them all would cost something like $10 billion per year over 20 years. Soil cleanup in the hardest-hit urban neighborhoods is tougher to get a handle on, with estimates ranging from $2 to $36 per square foot. A rough extrapolation from Mielke's estimate to clean up New Orleans suggests that a nationwide program might cost another $10 billion per year.
So in round numbers that's about $20 billion per year for two decades. But the benefits would be huge. Let's just take a look at the two biggest ones. By Mielke and Zahran's estimates, if we adopted the soil standard of a country like Norway (roughly 100 ppm or less), it would bring about $30 billion in annual returns from the cognitive benefits alone (higher IQs, and the resulting higher lifetime earnings). Cleaning up old windows might double this. And violent crime reduction would be an even bigger benefit. Estimates here are even more difficult, but Mark Kleiman suggests that a 10 percent drop in crime—a goal that seems reasonable if we get serious about cleaning up the last of our lead problem—could produce benefits as high as $150 billion per year.
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= new reply since forum marked as read
The resulting disabilities likely led to his fatal confrontation with Baltimore cops. 
Here there are gaps.
The estimates for houses with lead-based paint is also probably highly inflated. They go for maximum poutrage, and here you have it: Many have been gentrified, windows replaced to be more efficient, or otherwise refurbished. Moreover, the lead that's just sitting there is like the asbestos in a lot of buildings that's just sitting there: As long as it's not disturbed it's not in your lungs or bloodstream.
Most of the lead from cars is still in soil, and is inorganic, with a lot of it by now just being PbO or some complex with PbO. But most of it landed within a dozen yards or less of the roads, almost all within a couple dozen yards--and at that point was in the top foot or so. Most farm acreage doesn't need remediation, and most of what's taken up by plants winds up in leaves. Complicating matters is that soil pH matters a lot (most are fairly neutral, and lead isn't taken up much) and that organic matter binds lead "permanently" (since that organic stuff decays, let's understand that to mean "for a long time."
If there are storm drains, a lot of the lead winds up there, and then in streams and rivers. It's fairly insoluble and once covered will tend to stay that way until it's disturbed by, say, construction or a flood.
This is old news. It's been around for over a decade. Most of the effects have been factored out or generalized by now (and weren't new, then: ceramics, pottery, pewter, crystal all contained hefty amounts of lead; those rich people in the 19th century would have been ingesting more than most poor kids in the '50s; and we won't mention all the medicines that contained Hg).
Here's a decent summary quantifying IQ loss v blood serum lead concentration, and pointing out some of the methological pitfalls. http://www.scielosp.org/scielo.php?pid=S0042-96862000000900003&script=sci_arttext
What a lot of the studies fail to point out is what happens in more fine-grained approaches with larger data sets. Yeah, you look at urban violence and minority test scores, it looks like there's a huge influence of lead from paint and cars. But then you look at distribution within the US, small towns and various states, and that correlation weakens quite a bit, with similar expected Pb concentrations correlated in one way in one place and not correlated in another. Makes life tough for epidemiologists, and those pitfalls in that PDF are worth noticing.
In just one occupation at a large hi-tech location did the employer include proper ventilation (management at another hi-tech facility in town chuckled about how the fumes would put lead in your pencil). This has been in R&D work, not production, so RoHS (Restriction of Hazardous Subtances) and no-lead solder was not always in force.
I guess I have a good excuse now.. 
