CPSIA - Safety Nirvana Reached!

There isn't a day that goes by that I don't wake up feeling grateful for all the safety we now get to experience under the CPSIA! What an exciting future we have ahead with so many "terrible" products removed from the market. And now the CPSC has been given new marching orders to vigorously look out for our interests – FINALLY – and not let all those corporate bad guys poison us! It’s a dream. . . .

Why just the other day, I was marveling at the analysis of the re-energized and resurgent CPSC in their review of the scurrilous application for exemption by the ATV industry and motorcycle industry. Okay, if you must ask, yes, they have lost billions under the CPSIA even though no one was ever hurt by the lead in the alloys they use, but heck, we’re talking about safety here! Incredibly, those people think the CPSC will let them off the hook even though they ADMIT use of their product will result in the intake of lead (!): “[The authors’” calculations [of lead intake from casual contact with their products] resulted in an estimated lead intake of 0.015 – 0.05 micrograms of lead per day. . . .” OMG! Do you realize that’s between 1.5 and 5 one-hundred-millionths of a gram of lead EVERY SINGLE DAY!

To put this in perspective, the exemption application authors note that this “intake of lead from motorized recreational vehicles would be well below background intake from food and water (i.e., for a 6 year old, about 2.2 μg/day from food and 0.6 μg/day from water).” [Emphasis added.] Yeah, so what, ATV industry?! The CPSC reviewers note that the FDA has a recommended 0.1 ppm of lead maximum level for candy. The mathematics of this is that in a single 7 gram piece of candy, such as the Coffee Nips I tend to enjoy, have as much as 0.7 micrograms of lead in them. [This explains why I feel stupider every day . . . but, of course, I tend to spend a lot of time thinking about the CPSIA and that could be another explanation.] In other words, my nightly Coffee Nip has about 14-47x the lead that a child might expect to take in from daily contact with an ATV. No wonder the consumer groups are so darned worried about ATVs!

You can stop worrying about this horror of this spectacle. The resurgent CPSC blew off the exemption request, as instructed by the CPSIA, to save the American public from a lead DISASTER: “Because the requestors’ report indicated that the children’s use of motorized recreational vehicles could result in the intake of lead, and therefore absorption, however small the absorbed amount, the staff’s initial recommendation . . . is to not grant the request. . . .” I don’t know about you, but I feel so much safer now!

In the same spirit, I want to pass along my Kafkaesque CPSIA Moment of the Week: In this link, you will enjoy the NBC report on Family Dollar Stores destroying kids' shoes because they didn’t have a safety test report on file. Notably, Family Dollar Stores does not deny the incident – they seem proud of their destruction of the shoes for lack of paperwork, despite the fact that a gentlemen in the aisle offered to buy the shoes to give to charity. Charities be darned, this is all about safety! You know the hazard, shoes in the mouth – that’s so typical of kids. . . . With Congress and the CPSIA to guide us, no doubt this scenario will be repeated time and again – to make us so much SAFER!

Ain’t America great?! Especially after we put Nancy Pelosi and Henry Waxman in charge.