Proposition 65 was a voter referendum that stated if a chemical was correlated to cancer, it needed to have a cancer warning label. Lawyers who were behind the public relations effort to get it passed assured consumers it would not be abused. Yet a few years later, epidemiologists inside the once-credible International Agency for Research on Cancer in France set out to gain "expert witness" contracts from lawyers and began to create more and more "correlations" - no science needed, just a possible link in mice - and now over 80,000 products carry these labels.

Not only will you find warning labels on nearly every product inside a Walmart, a warning label is on the outside, to warn you that the brick and glass has been "linked to" cancer.


Photo: Hank Campbell

Even the corkboard inside a hospital cancer ward has a warning that you may get cancer in the cancer ward.



It's all nonsense, of course, and a key reason trust in epidemiology is down near trust in Congress and lawyers. Cigarettes, alcohol, and plutonium, those cause cancer, but IARC claims bacon is as dangerous as plutonium. California insists decades later that if IARC designates it a "hazard" it must have a label, which is shocking to residents of other states and countries, until they realize it is just a ridiculous "California thing."

Lawsuits are so lucrative that groups have entire conferences devoted to finding new ways for predatorts to file nuisance lawsuits and get a quick settlement from companies.


Want to get rich with nuisance lawsuits but shaking down dry cleaners for 1/16th of an inch ramp infractions under ADA seems like too much work? Turn your predatort firm onto Prop 65. You don't need to show harm, because the lawyers who wrote the referendum said companies must be held accountable if they ever might harm someone.

Californians who aren't jaded by this chronic undermining of trust in government science and health politics are simply resigned to it. They basically can't see the labels any more.

Groups who prey on public fear love IARC, though. They never mention that those epidemiological correlations ignore dose - so if they shoot 10,000 doses of a chemical into the stomach of a mouse and it gets cancer, that is the same as if you had a trace amount one time.  Silent Spring Institute is an example of an advocacy group squarely in the 'science is a corporate conspiracy' camp, and their funding by the organic industry and other anti-science activists shows in their claims.

They got a paper published that gushes about how great Prop 65 is despite it being nothing but casual discussions with people who obey Prop 65 because California is a large market. No science involved.

What far-left activists don't care about is how much California reformulations of products and warning labels or simply not selling in the state because they don't want to make a new warning label cost the poor. Environmental groups were overwhelmingly begun and led by eugenicists and their disciples but while the early eugenicists, like Supreme Court Justice and liberal lion Oliver Wendell Holmes, prominent authors like H.G. Wells, and progressive economist John Maynard  Keynes, wrapped their hatred of minorities and the poor in the language of science, modern eugenicists want to crush the poor economically rather than with abortion and sterilization.

The paper brags that their compilation of anecdotes leads them to cheer that 78% of products have had more expensive replacements, even though they helped no one. If warning labels prevent cancer, where are all of the dead bodies in 49 other states and every other country?

The flaktivists are giddy that 63% of companies whose executives they asked admit they have to pay more for raw materials.

The Usual Suspects who love that companies are forced to spend more are cheering this finding but if they knew any science or economics they wouldn't be happy. This kind of activism hurts the poor. Margaret Sanger would be proud, but people who care about economic fairness should be angry.