Agent Orange

Agent Orange, an herbicide and defoliant developed in World War II was heavily used in a systemic, originally secret campaign by the United States to destroy usable agricultural land during the Vietnam War. The campaign was far-reaching with 12% of the total area of Vietnam sprayed with the herbicide by 1971 at a concentration 13 times greater than the maximum allowance for domestic use put forth by the Department of Agriculture. By 1966 there were United Nations resolutions against the United States' use of Agent Orange, but the U.S. defeated these arguing that the defoliant was solely an herbicide.

The long-term effects began to be seen toward the ending of the war in the 1970s and included the development of a vast range of disabilities and health issues with 1-in-4 of the 4 million Vietnamese exposed affected. By the early 1990s the National Academy of Medicine began publishing findings linking exposure to Agent Orange to a variety of cancers and life threatening illnesses among veterans returned from Vietnam. But even before the public acknowledgement of the damaging effects of the chemical, a wide swath of musicians were using agent orange as a potent symbol in their music.

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