Vladimir Putin isn’t the only person who poisons others to accumulate wealth and power. In the United States, for example, a cast of unprincipled characters — corporate CEOs, their handsomely paid lobbyists, the politicians they corrupt, and bribed judges — peddle in the same madness, just not as sadistically as Russia’s president.

Individual gain routinely trumps public good. History provides endless examples of poisons being unleashed on human health and the environment before they are deemed safe. They are often sold to the public as making life easier. Nonstick cookware and waterproof boots do just that, but there is a considerable price to be paid for perfect eggs and dry socks.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), a toxic alphabet soup of manufactured chemicals linked to cancer, are the latest profitable poison allowed to sicken us and damage the natural world long after their dangers were first discovered.

Here’s a brief rundown of what unscrupulous people in positions of power in the United States have let loose when it comes to PFAS pollution and concern:

The authors of a peer-reviewed paper published in July wrote that the long-term impacts of using mixtures of “extremely persistent chemicals” on potentially hundreds of millions of acres of U.S. land every year is a cause for concern.

“Most, if not all, PFAS in pesticide products or their degradates are going to be chronic persistent pollutants for the foreseeable future of humanity, and their ultimate impact on human and environmental health are largely unknown,” they wrote.

The Air Force has refused to comply with an order to clean drinking water it polluted in Tucson, Ariz., with PFAS and other toxic substances. Empowered by the conservative-dominated Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Chevron doctrine, the Air Force has claimed the Environmental Protection Agency lacks the authority to make the order, citing the court’s decision as evidence and stating the “order can not withstand review.”

What a patriotic stance from a branch of the military with a taxpayer-funded budget of $215 billion. A big middle finger to people the Air Force is sworn to protect. Let the civilians whose drinking water we contaminated pay to clean it up. (The EPA’s annual budget is $12 billion.)

Ocean waves crashing on the world’s shores emit more PFAS into the air than the world’s industrial polluters, according to research published in April.

The study measured levels of PFAS released from the bubbles that burst when waves crash, spraying aerosols into the air. Researchers found ocean spray levels were hundreds of thousands times higher than levels in the water. This contaminated spray likely impacts groundwater, surface water, vegetation, and agricultural products near coastlines that are far from industrial sources, according to the article’s authors.

PFAS pollution from a Kleenex plant in New Milford, Conn., has contaminated nearby drinking water, put residents’ health at risk, and destroyed property values, a federal class-action lawsuit has alleged.

A conservative federal appeals court in March killed a ban on plastic containers contaminated with PFAS found to leach at alarming levels into food, cosmetics, household cleaners, pesticides, and other products across the economy.

A Texas-based company manufactures an estimated 200 million containers annually with a process that creates, among other chemicals, PFOA, a toxic PFAS compound. The EPA in December prohibited the company from using the manufacturing process. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals didn’t deny the containers’ health risks, but said the agency couldn’t regulate the plastic vessels under the statute it used.

A July study aimed at identifying foods that contain higher levels of PFAS found people who eat more white rice, coffee, eggs, and seafood typically showed more of the toxic chemicals in their plasma and breast milk.

Several brands of condoms and lubricants, including Trojan and K-Y Jelly, contain alarming levels of PFAS, according to research published earlier this year.

Water utilities nationwide have begun warning customers of rate hikes needed to install technology to filter toxic PFAS. The corporations that make the poison and those who allow them to distribute the product pay nothing, except, perhaps, a more expensive water bill.

PFAS, manufactured and used in a variety of industries worldwide since the 1940s, are used or have been used to protect carpets from spills, to make cookware nonstick, and to formulate firefighting foams. They are in polishes, waxes, paints, and cleaning products. They coat pizza boxes and microwave popcorn bags. They waterproof jackets.

They have been found in the blood of people worldwide and in human breast milk.

Government regulation of these toxic chemicals using a one-substance-at-a-time approach, along with the free market, has failed to protect public health. Decades after knowing about the harms caused by PFAS, government has moved slowly and pathetically to ban or restrict their use, even though there is no constitutional amendment protecting them.

There is a growing amount of evidence that exposure to these aptly labeled “forever chemicals” — because they don’t break down and can accumulate over time, in our bodies and in the environment — can lead to bad health. This bad movie is played on a loop.

The use of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), asbestos, and lead in paint and gasoline continued long after the risks to public health and wildlife were determined. Scientific warnings about these toxic substances were ignored while cancer clusters grew and wildlife died.

Greed and special interests also protected the tobacco industry long after the dangers of its products and secondhand smoke were documented.

The same forces are at play now, protecting the fossil fuel industry and chemical manufactures such as 3M and Dupont.

PFAS are a group of fluorinated chemicals, which includes PFOA, PFOS, GenX, and a slew of other compound acronyms, that have been accumulating in our bodies for generations. They are, as disgraceful Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell would say, persistent, and they number nearly 15,000.

Certain PFAS chemicals are no longer manufactured in the United States, as a result of phaseouts “in which eight major chemical manufacturers agreed to eliminate the use of PFOA and PFOA-related chemicals in their products and as emissions from their facilities,” according to the EPA.

Although PFOA and PFOS are no longer manufactured here, they are still produced internationally and can be imported into the United States in consumer goods such as carpet, leather and apparel, textiles, paper and packaging, rubber, and plastics. They also can be created in the manufacturing process (See Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, Texas).

Some back-of-the-napkin calculation shows 0.0005% of PFAS can no longer be manufactured here while two that can’t are still allowed to be present in imported goods. We ban books with more efficiency.

Manufacturers don’t have to disclose to consumers that they are using forever chemicals, companies aren’t required to disclose when PFAS are used as an inert ingredient, and the EPA doesn’t regulate or test for most PFAS, even though extremely low levels of exposure can negatively impact human health.

The chemical-industrial complex, which includes the fossil fuel/plastics industry, has spent decades covering up evidence of the negative human and environmental impacts associated with PFAS saturation.

The American Chemistry Council and the corporations that manufacture these toxic chemicals loudly oppose any effort to curb their use. Late last month, The Guardian reported that scientists with financial ties to industry and histories of producing controversial research to derail chemical regulations are mobilizing to attack new federal drinking water limits for toxic PFAS.

This class of often poisonous compounds defended by Putin-like minions from any form of regulation has been linked, in both humans and animals, to kidney and testicular cancer, impaired liver function, chronic intestinal inflammation, hormone disruption, weight gain, thyroid problems, interference with vaccine effectiveness, elevated blood pressure during pregnancy, reduced sperm counts, infertility, and abnormal fetal development.

In April, researchers found that exposure to PFAS increases the likelihood of death by cardiovascular disease. Two months later, researchers discovered that forever chemicals are absorbed through human skin at levels much higher than previously thought.

Note: The greedy and unconscionable Sackler family, the transatlantic dynasty largely responsible for America’s opioid crisis by relentlessly pushing OxyContin, make Putin look like an amateur. The family long deceived the public and our corrupted system of checks and balances about the safety of a pill that is stronger than morphine. The Sackler empire created countless addicts. The opioid epidemic has killed some 450,000 people in the past two decades. No Sackler went to prison. The family was fined a fraction of its total wealth.

Frank Carini can be reached at [email protected]. His opinions don’t reflect those of ecoRI News.