Cancer warnings on California Starbucks coffee and why it is, sort of, justifiable.

You might have heard about the California judge who ruled that Starbucks and other big coffee vendors will have to put a cancer warning on their products in the state. This is puzzling, in view of the very wide agreement among toxicologists and epidemiologists that coffee, even when consumed in heroic amounts, does not cause cancer. There is plenty of evidence on coffee from studies of enormous populations, and if anything those studies tend to suggest that the optimum amount of coffee for human health is more than zero. You certainly can’t find the kind of mortality signal you would expect to see if coffee were actually a danger worth thinking about.

So ... California, am I right, guys? America’s canonical nanny state, Left Coast bureaucrats, etc., etc. A hundred people have already written that column, but let me say a few words in defence of — or at least to account for — a process that has led to a perverse outcome.

California’s coffee shops are facing a tough environmental law that is still referred to as “Proposition 65” — the name of the 1986 ballot initiative that led to its creation. Right off the bat, this obviously lifts some blame from the “regulators” and “bureaucrats” we libertarians are fond of knocking: if cancer warnings on coffee are madness, it is madness that Californians voted to live with, and by almost two to one.

If you visit California, you will see vague, legalistic “Proposition 65” warning notices all over the place. Disneyland provides a popular, well-known example: the park is dotted with little signs that state “The Disneyland Resort contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.” The signs, it should be added, do not seem to discourage anybody. Disneyland is still a thing in California, and Starbucks coffee is bound to be, too.

The essence of Proposition 65 is a list of hazardous substances, and coffee has been targeted because it contains sub-microscopic amounts of acrylamide, a molecule that is on the list. Acrylamide found its way into scare headlines about 20 years ago when its unsuspected presence in cooked starchy foods was first discovered. In large amounts acrylamide is used industrially as a precursor for polymers, and it is known to be nasty stuff — it hits the trifecta of being carcinogenic, neurotoxic, and teratogenic. Workers are protected from daily skin exposures on the microgram scale.

But since acrylamide is probably produced by what chemists and cooks call the Maillard reaction, it is present in smaller amounts in almost everything that tastes good, assuming that it was fried or roasted as opposed to boiled. No one really does know what effects this pervasive dietary acrylamide might have on humans, so California regulators, influenced by animal-model evidence, have set tight limits on acrylamide in food and water.

What we do know pretty confidently is that coffee doesn’t cause cancer, period. But the nature of Proposition 65 puts the focus on the acrylamide molecule per se, rather than coffee. The nonprofit group that sued Starbucks et al. is not even technically claiming that coffee causes cancer. It is just claiming that Starbucks serves an illegal quantity of a particular carcinogen without warning consumers — and that is what the court found.

This question is being decided by a court because California basically outsources the enforcement of Proposition 65 to “public interest” litigation gangs: the plaintiff in the coffee suit, a creature called the Council for Education and Research on Toxics (CERT), is one of these. Normally we would expect a handful of “public interest” lawyers to be badly outgunned against a series of companies such as Starbucks, but in California, groups like CERT can essentially collect fines or settlements in environmental suits as well as billing for their litigation expenses. It is happy hunting if done right. Some corporate plaintiffs in the suit have already settled, and handed over millions.

You could consider this a weird sort of “privatization.” You can even imagine a leftist objecting to the idea of lawyers hoovering pennies out of the pockets of working-class coffee drinkers because California does not want to go to the trouble of designing sensible regulation — as opposed to just writing down a list of chemicals and telling the state bar “Have at it, maniacs.”

The actual regulators in California are constantly updating and refining their schedule of proscribed substances, and it should be noted that the Proposition 65 law was updated in 2013 to give small businesses some protection from public interest litigation. Starbucks faces a different standard, and that is something it is hard to lose sleep over.

But precisely because Starbucks is so big, adding a warning sticker to its fivedollar cups of coffee is a less expensive bargaining chip in litigation than launching a Manhattan Projectsized research program into acrylamide and altering an entire universe of industrial processes to prevent an undetectable harm. The overall result of the law — again, as observant California visitors will have noticed — is “regulation” in the form of a plethora of signs and labels that cost money, but that everybody ignores. Whatever else might be said of this as an obnoxious social side-effect, it does beat just outlawing coffee.

SIGNS AND LABELS THAT COST MONEY, BUT THAT EVERYBODY IGNORES.