What is the reason behind California cancer warning labels? Literally everything seems to be causing cancer. I just bought a few s2s maple boards from a local lumber supplier and each one had a sticker saying it’s known to the State of California to cause cancer. A maple board? There’s no treatment or paint on it. It’s just a milled and poorly planed piece of lumber.
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Proposition 65 effectively requires any product with any amount of any substance with any evidence at all that it causes cancer to be labeled accordingly. This sounds like a good idea in theory but things get a little murky in the real world because science is complicated and 10 studies might say a substance doesn’t have any effect on cancer risk but one study says there is a correlation and you end up with a proposition 65 warning for something that most scientists don’t think actually causes cancer. This leads to the warning being on countless products which almost certainly do not cause cancer which has pretty much completely defeated the purpose of informing consumers, especially when we could be educating people about things that actually cause cancer like ultraviolet radiation from the Sun, and smoking.
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