CPSC: Working to Foment Fear At the Expense of Kids

We’ve written about toy safety and specifically, the importance of the landmark Consumer Product Safety Act (CPSIA) in making sure kids stay protected.  Incredibly, toys with illegal lead levels continue to be sold in discount stores, showing all the more how urgent it is that this law is enforced.

Unfortunately, the Consumer Products Safety Commission is STILL dragging its feet with respect to providing guidance to smaller enterprises (like home businesses and libraries) as to how the law applies to them—and the longer that goes on, the more apparent it becomes that the agency’s inaction is part of a deliberate attempt to sabotage the law.

Consider this recent news item about the effect of the CPSIA on children’s books.  According to the article, “The Consumer Product Safety Commission has interpreted the law to include books but has neither concluded that older books could be hazardous to children nor made any recommendations to libraries about quarantining such tomes.”

Now, as we’ve said and the agency has every reason to know, the CPSC’s silence on this issue has the effect of causing widespread confusion, and providing big corporate opponents with a rather potent PR weapon against the entire law.

The law basically directs the CPSC to exempt children’s goods that pose no risk of harm, telling the CPSC to issue exemptions to the law “taking into account normal and reasonable foreseeable use and abuse of such product by a child.”  But the agency won’t act on these exemptions—and we can only conclude after all this time that the corporate shills within the CPSC (like former Director of Consumer Affairs for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and current CPSC head, Nancy Nord, who has always loathed this law) are intentionally trying to kill the CPSIA—at the expense of kids.

Comments

[Sarah Natividad]

If you read the law more carefully, you'll see that the CPSC can only issue such exemptions as books would merit on the basis of peer-reviewed scientific evidence. They are NOT permitted to make exemptions based on common sense, known usage patterns, Congressional urgings, or reasoned blog posts. Given that books were never a lead poisoning suspect in the first place, such evidence did not exist last August-- nobody ever thought there'd be a need for it. So now such research is being conducted by both CPSC and industry and it takes time. Moreover, it takes people-hours to do this kind of research-- people-hours that cannot then be spent on enforcing standards on toys.

People who are concerned about enforcement and think enforcement should be prioritized should be in support of increasing funding for the CPSC, especially if they are also in favor of CPSIA which requires CPSC to spend a lot of resources on proving books are lead-free. CPSIA allowed for such an increase, but Congress has not yet released the funds. Therefore the ultimate responsibility for CPSC's inability to enforce the law falls on Congress, who both burdened them with CPSIA and failed to provide them with the resources to implement it.

[Joe Consumer]

Thanks for sharing your views, Sarah.

You'll find that we address them in the following post: http://www.thepoptort.com/2009/03/true-lies-debunking-a-major-cpsia-myth.html

Thanks for reading ThePopTort!