When the Proposition 65 referendum, the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986, was being debated, concerns about abuse and high cost were dismissed by the lawyers behind it with the assurance that lawyers wouldn't decide what products would be deemed carcinogens, the state would abdicate that to France's International Agency for Research on Cancer.

Voters agreed that epidemiologists, so methodical and conservative they showed cigarette smoke was a carcinogen but were last to accept a hereditary link in cancers, until they had enough data, were good arbiters of public health. Voters were correct. Dr. John Higginson, M.D., Ph.D., the first director of IARC, was a personal hero of mine.

What voters did not know was that lawyers had other plans - and those plans involved increasing the number of compounds IARC listed as cancer-causing hazards so lawsuits can be filed. Since then, IARC has become a joke in science circles, declaring eating pickles and bacon are as harmful as eating plutonium and bizarrely suggesting that plants are tiny green people so weedkillers will kill us also.(1) 


Graphic representation by Hank Campbell

The cultural impact has been substantial; tourists are first alarmed by cancer warnings on 80,000 different products - including the building materials of stores they enter - and then they laugh about it, and the imagery of "wacky California" is perpetuated.


Photo: Hank Campbell

The higher costs are no laughing matter. Poor people nationwide endured 44% higher costs for food since 2021, but California has it far worse on food and everything else, because while Prop 65 has never prevented even a single instance of cancer, IARC adding new compounds every year, from a few in 1986 when Prop 65 was passed to over 900 now, requires special formulations if companies don't want epidemiology labels alleging the product they are selling causes cancer.

To activists, the poor don't matter, only their war on science in the guise of being "anti-corporate" does. The Silent Spring Institute, named after writer Rachel Carson's famous book lobbying against the pesticide DDT, have a new paper in a pay-to-publish magazine cheering how successful the efforts of the lawyers behind Prop 65 have been.


Companies even hold seminars for aspiring lawsuit merchants, showing what new things they can sue about using Prop 65 and how to find targets. Lives saved: 0

They are pleased that 78% of the companies they interviewed said Prop 65 made them reformulate their products with higher-cost alternatives. They like that the 63% listing California as a key market laid off the higher costs of their products on people outside California as well.

They are thrilled that companies don't want to be forced to pretend their product causes cancer so they charge more for a placebo that hasn't been targeted by IARC and the lawyers and activists groups getting their allies on working groups.

How has any of that improved public health? It hasn't, but the $3 billion environmental activism industry is not concerned about public health at the high levels. There has always been a barely hidden agenda, as anyone who knows the history of events like Earth Day are well aware.

Prop 65 is no better. The skeptics were right, it was all about lawsuits and never about protecting people.

(1) The problem became compounded during the tenure of Dr. Chris Wild. IARC banned any epidemiologist who consulted for industry from appearing on working group panels, while recruiting epidemiologists employed by environmental activists who were campaigning against products that IARC was "evaluating." Some were contracted by trial lawyers and handsomely paid while they were evaluating products IARC would then unsurprisingly declare a hazard.