Caroline Fraser

But all of the smelters during the war were kind of, they weren't taken over by the government, but the government introduced all kinds of price fixing and so forth to make it not possible for these companies to raise prices.

astronomically.

And a lot of the stuff was requisitioned for the war effort.

So in El Paso, by the 1970s, they were starting to discover that this whole area around the smokestack of the smelter was heavily lead contaminated.

And what I

I thought, well, El Paso, that's interesting.

But there were no serial killers in El Paso.

And so I Googled that.

And like, you know, within a minute, I discover that Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, grew up in El Paso, not very far from the smelter.

And, you know, we associate him now with Los Angeles because that's where he committed most of his murders, but he did not grow up there.

Yeah, when you start looking up, okay, well, what's the crime rate, the violent crime rate in El Paso?

And yes, that starts going up in the 1970s.

And so there does seem to be an association with this.

There's a guy named...

Rick Nevin, who is an economist and social scientist, and he put together a paper about this, which was published online, that includes about 45 graphs of all these different –

You know, showing the rise in violent crime, the rise in teen pregnancies, which is sort of how women come into it.

The impulsivity seems to have perhaps led to a real rise in teen pregnancies in the 70s and 80s, which, you know, if you remember, that was kind of a big thing then.

Yeah.

I think that was in the 1960s, early 60s, that that first becomes available.

I can't tell you exactly what year.