Proposition 65 Is, Politely, Full of Shit
This one goes out to my Californian consumers.
Who here ignores, wholesale, every single piece of signage related to Proposition 65 (which, for non-Californians, is a law that requires companies to add signage to their product if they contain known carcinogens)? I do. If Starbucks, gas stations, and candy stores all need to produce vague signage declaring their products potentially carcinogenic, while class 1 carcinogen red meat needs no such label, I’m a little skeptical about its added benefits. It turns into background noise. It’s clearly political what products need to have a warning. If enough voters banded together, I’m sure they could get one of these signs posted on the sun itself for its known impact on skin cancer.
The LA Times produced a wonderful deep dive into the bureaucratic, technocratic bullshit of Proposition 65. Some highlights include:
- The law was only put on the ballot in order to incentivize liberal voters to come to the polls and, hopefully, oust a Republican mayor of Los Angeles. The proposition won handily; as did the Republican. Thus, a proposition written by a handful of lawyers with no legislative review, whose only purpose was to energize the base, became the law of the land.
- The proposition makes it really hard to be a small business! For example, if you want to avoid including a label, you often need to work with lawyers and scientists to identify what is the maximum amount of a chemical that can be inside of a product before it needs a warning. The article includes a wonderful examination of bobbers for fishing. Bobbers are plastic, and plastic is carcinogenic when consumed orally, and so the fishing companies had to produced detailed models showing that no, the amount of plastic flakes that rub off on a fisherman’s hands when using the bobber do not rise to a level that would present any harm to the fisher. Try figuring that stuff out if you’re a small artisanal bobber salesman on Etsy–you wouldn’t have the cash to hire all of the necessary personnel.
- Or there are simpler ways to skirt around a Proposition 65 lawsuit. A tea company was found to have too much lead per serving of tea. Instead of reducing the lead in their product, they just changed the serving size for their tea. The point of Proposition 65 was to reduce lead and lethal chemicals in our products, but clearly it had no such impact here.
It really looks to me like Proposition 65 is a brilliant racket for lawyers and certain litigious individuals, but presents slim benefits to actual consumers.