22 Things That Are ILLEGAL NOW but Were Normal in the 1980s
PART 2
One minute later, silence for good. CBS and NBC said they had lost half of their advertising revenue. The brands simply moved to magazines, billboards, and race cars where nobody had banned anything. Nobody in Washington took the issue up seriously again. Number three, buying milk straight from the producer without going through any industrial process was a common thing in much of the United States in the 1970s.
A farm sold a bucket of raw milk at the gate or delivered it in a bottle to the neighbor. Many families thought it tasted better, richer, and saw it as real food without chemicals. Nobody thought about bacteria while drinking a pure glass drawn from the cow that morning. Nobody took a photo of that as if it were something rare.
The problem is that raw milk carries salmonella, lististeria, and ecoli when the cow or the milking process is not perfect. And in the 1970s and 80s, the disease outbreaks linked to it kept piling up. The FDA had known about the risks since 1974, even drafted a proposal for a ban in 1982, and simply shelved the matter for years, letting the product circulate freely between states with no federal barrier.
The milk arrived fresh straight from the morning bucket. A federal judge had to force the agency to act. Norma Holloway Johnson ruled in 1986 that the FDA’s conduct had been arbitrary, and the ban on interstate transport of raw milk did not come out until 1987. Today, each state decides on its own about sales within its own borders.
And since 1987, there have been 143 disease outbreaks linked to raw milk in the United States, some with miscarriage and death. The map remains divided the same way to this day. Number four, every family backyard in the 1970s had a set of metal lawn darts to play with after the barbecue. Adults and children threw them together, aiming at a plastic ring on the grass in the mood of a Sunday late afternoon.
The dart had a real steel tip and weight concentrated at the front, made to turn in the air and stick straight into the ground. It sat on the same store shelf as a beach ball and a jump rope within reach of any child. All you needed was to be tall enough to reach the right shelf. The packaging said it was a toy for adults, but almost no store took that seriously, and the advertising aimed straight at families with children.
A small child running to grab their own ball or simply distracted in the middle of the game became a target by accident. Between 1978 and 1986, the darts caused about 6,100 emergency room visits in the United States with at least three deaths, and 81% of the victims were under 15. None of the data served as a warning to anyone at the time.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission banned the sale in 1988 after years of pressure from grieving families. The problem is that millions of units were already scattered in garages and basements across the whole country, ignoring the factory ban. 9 years later in 1997, the commission had to put out a new statement telling parents to destroy the old darts in these exact words, destroy, do not keep.
The phrase stayed marked forever in the middle of the movement. Today, there is a version with a rounded plastic tip that makes the same arc in the air, lands in the same place, and does not pierce anything at all. The question that lingers is why it took 6,000 injuries and three documented deaths for someone to think of that obvious material swap.
The original darts, the ones with the steel tip, still turn up at auctions and American antique fairs. Illegal, sold as collector’s items. Today, it would be caused for a recall and a chain of lawsuits. Number five, sending your small child to the corner store to buy cigarettes for dad was a normal everyday errand like buying bread.
The child walked in, asked for the brand, paid, and came back. And the clerk did not even look at their age. A cigarette machine in a restaurant hallway handled the rest on its own. All you needed was a coin in your pocket with no adult in the way, no question, no ID asked for. The store owner never saw it as their problem and neither did the customer.
This was not the exception of an irresponsible merchant. It was the picture of a law that simply did not exist in most of the country. In 1986, 12 entire American states had no age restriction at all on tobacco sales, among them Georgia, Kentucky, and Wisconsin. Selling a pack to a 10-year-old was as legal as selling gum, and no seller ran any risk of a fine for it.
This held equally in the big city and in the small country town. The turning point only came in July of 1992 with a Sinar amendment from Congressman Mike Sinar of Oklahoma. It required every state to have and enforce a law against tobacco sales to anyone under 18 under penalty of losing up to 40% of federal health funding. Enforcement began to use undercover teenagers trying to buy at randomly chosen stores.
In December of 2019, the federal minimum age rose for good to 21 across the whole country. It was a fast shift to a far stricter standard. Number six, in 1950, you could buy at an ordinary toy store a box with real uranium inside for a child to play with at home. It was not a decorative mineral, nor a plastic simulation.
The Gilbert U238 atomic energy lab came with four glass jars full of real radioactive ore taken from the Colorado Plateau. Ottomite, tobite, uranite, and carnit. It cost $49.50, 50 the price of a luxury toy for the era. It was a high price even for a middle-ass family. The child set up an experiment on their own bedroom desk with a battery powered geer counter, an electroscope, a spin theoscope, and a cloud chamber with a palonium source built into a wire.
The 60-page manual taught it step by step. And it came with a comic book written in partnership with the general who had headed the Manhattan Project, the same program that made the atomic bomb. It was designed to fascinate, and it truly did. It was real science inside a toy box.
On the inside cover of the box, the word safe was written in large letters. The manual asked for only one thing. Do not take the ore out of the jar. And the reason given was not to protect the child from radiation. It was that the ore crumbles, spreads through the room, and raises the background reading of the counter, throwing off the next experiment.
The child’s safety was never mentioned in a single line of the text. The focus of the warning was never the child handling it. The toy vanished from production in 1951 with no recall, no lawsuit, no government agency stepping in. It sold fewer than 5,000 units, and the owner himself explained later that the company lost money on every box and that the product was too complex for the age that bought it.
It was not safety that pulled it off the market. It was losses. Today, a complete original box is worth more than 100 times the launch price. Proof that rarity is worth more than safety in the collector’s market. Number seven, every child’s pajamas sold in the United States in the 1970s came treated with a chemical that caused genetic mutation.
And that was not a manufacturer’s failure. It was a requirement of the law itself. In the 1940s, children’s clothing caught fire easily and there were household deaths because of it. So, Congress in 1953 required children’s sleepwear to resist flame for a minimum time before burning.
The cheapest way to meet the requirement was to soak the fabric in a compound called brminated tri. It worked against fire and passed the tests required by law with no problem on the label. The detail nobody saw was that the compound did not stay locked into the fiber. It passed through the child’s skin throughout the entire night of sleep.
Researchers found a mutagenic substance in the urine of children who slept in those pajamas. Sleep became the entry point for the whole problem. Prominated trace came out of children’s sleepwware in 1977 after the link to cancer in laboratory animals came to light, but it was never banned by any written law.
It came out through informal pressure from scientists and public opinion without a single line of signed regulation in a behind-the-scenes agreement with the industry. Banning a chemical substance by law in the United States is rare. Asbestous, for example, has never truly been banned to this day.
The case is still cited in environmental law courses. Number eight, smoking inside a hospital was routine, even in a patient’s room. A doctor made morning rounds with a cigarette in his mouth and rested the butt in the ashtray on the chart cart between one note and the next. Nobody saw that as a contradiction.
The discussion that existed about restricting cigarettes in hospitals, when it existed, was about the risk of fire near oxygen, never about the health of the patient lying right there. The patient breathed it in with no choice at all in the matter. The American school had a smoking area for students with a marked off space in the yard not hidden.
And sometimes the teacher smoked next to the student during the same break. The administration’s logic was to regulate rather than ban because in their minds the student was going to smoke anyway. A good part of the faculty smoked too, sometimes in the classroom itself between one explanation and the next with a cigarette resting on the edge of the desk.
It was treated as part of the job, not as an exception. On the airplane, the ashtray came from the factory built into the armrest. There was a smoking section and a non-smoking section, separated by a sign and nothing more in the same air recirculating through the entire cabin. A passenger who did not smoke breathed in someone else’s smoke for 6 hours straight with no door, no window to open, with the smell of cigarettes mixed with the smell of airplane food and jet fuel the whole flight.
Nobody complained because everybody accepted it as the normal standard. The change came in slices. Short flights became smoke-free in 1988, medium flights in 1990, and only in 2000 did the ban cover everything leaving or entering the United States. Hospitals had given in earlier in 1992 when accreditation began to require a smoke-free building.
Schools closed the smoking area for good in 1994. It took a little over 20 years for smoking inside a building to become unthinkable. The whole shift took more than two decades to fully complete. Number nine. Every schoolyard in the late 1960s had that dry sound of two hard balls colliding in the air. It was the clacker.
Two balls attached to the ends of a cord with a little ring in the middle which the child swung with a finger until the balls struck below and above faster and faster, louder and louder. It became a whole recess craze. The kind where everybody had one and practiced walking down the street. It was exactly that rhythm that made the toy addictive.
The first versions used tempered glass and glass does exactly what you would expect of it when it strikes hard many times in a row. It cracks and explodes. They switched to acrylic thinking that would solve it and the acrylic shattered the same way, creating an invisible crack until it suddenly exploded at the height of the face of the child who was playing.
The Society for the Prevention of Blindness issued a public warning in 1971 after cases of eye injury. The report caught parents attention. There was also a second problem nobody had foreseen. The transparent versions left in the sun on top of paper or fabric worked like a lens and concentrated the light until they caught fire.
The FDA documented cases like that. Even with all of that, in August of 1971, Italy hosted the first World Clacker Championship in a small village organized by a former boxer and a priest. Proof that the toy still sold well despite the known risk. That did not stop anyone from continuing to buy them.
The American Safety Commission classified the clacker as a mechanical hazard and banned the sale, but the product kept showing up for years in stores and at fairs. In December of 1985, the United States Marshall himself seized nearly 4,600 units of a model called Carebangers in Phoenix. The box said unbreakable in large letters.
In the official tests, the balls cracked and the cord broke along with them. The packaging promised the opposite of what the commission found. Number 10. Owning a monkey. a macaw or a boa constrictor inside the house in the 1970s was just a matter of money in your pocket and the will to do it. You walked into the pet store, chose one, paid, and took it home with no question, no license, no inspector’s visit afterward.
A large cat also circulated in private collections. In 1971, a technical college in Ohio adopted a real tiger named Monado as the official mascot of the campus with its own enclosure at the school. The school never hid it from anyone. Quite the opposite. The federal law that existed, the Lacy Act of 1900, had been written for illegal hunting and invasive species, not to regulate who could keep a lion in the backyard.
Each state was free to decide on its own, and most simply decided nothing. Ohio was one of those states with no rules at all, and this was known among exotic animal collectors for decades without anyone finding it urgent to change. The silence lasted too long to be mere coincidence. On October 18th, 2011, decades after that legal vacuum began, Terry Thompson opened the cages of the 56 animals he kept on a farm in Zanesville, Ohio, cut the bars with pliers, and took his own life.
There were 18 tigers, 17 lions, eight bears, plus leopards, wolves, and primates loose near a busy road. The schools in the region canceled classes the next day, and the police told everyone to stay indoors. The whole town came to a stop that October evening. The veterinarians could not sedate almost any of the animals because they did not know the weight or the last meal of each one.
Essential data for calculating a dose. The police shot them. 48 of the 56 died. The only survivors were the ones that stayed locked in their own cages. Ohio created a state law the following year. The federal law on large cats, the one that had always been missing, did not come out until 2022, 11 years after the episode.
The gap between the two events bothers those who study the case. Number 11. Catching a plane in the United States until 1972 meant walking right up to the aircraft door alongside your friends with nobody searching your bag, no metal detector, no ID check. Family and relatives accompanied the passenger to the boarding stairs and stood waving while the plane taxied.
The cockpit door stayed unlocked during the entire flight open to the aisle with nobody thinking of it as a risk. Today, this sounds like the script of a completely different era. All that freedom coexisted with a wave of airplane hijackings that was practically out of control. Between 1968 and 1972, there were 305 hijackings in the world.
And the United States alone had more than 130 in 4 years, most of them demanding a detour to Cuba. Then came the hijackings for a cash ransom, including the case of the man who parachuted out with the money in the middle of the night and was never found by anyone. The case became a symbol of the period in books and documentaries.
What changed everything was the hijacking of Southern Airways Flight 49 in November of 1972 when the Yen hijackers threatened to crash the plane into an American nuclear reactor. 2 months later, on January 5th, 1973, mandatory screening of passengers and baggage took effect at every airport in the country.
In that year alone, 185 million people passed through a detector for the first time in their lives. The number is striking for coming from a single year of a rule change. Number 12. Every grocery store in the United States sold candy cigarettes to children. A white stick of sugar with the tip painted red, imitating a lit ember inside a box identical to a real pack.
A child bought them with the week’s spare change and walked down the street pretending to inhale and blow out smoke, imitating dad, the uncle, the movie actor in a gesture everyone thought was cute and harmless at the time. Many people still remember the old red mark without knowing why. The real tobacco companies formally authorized the candy factories to copy their brand and their packaging in a direct commercial agreement between industries.
11 states tried to ban the product between 1970 and 1990 and none succeeded because the candy industry lobby knocked down bill after bill in the legislature. Only North Dakota had banned it earlier between 1953 and 1967 and then repealed its own law. The product survived four decades of attempted bans. What really changed was only the word written on the box.
After 1970, the factory swapped cigarette for sticks and kept selling the same product with the same design. The 2009 law removed the term from the packaging for good, but banned nothing. Candy cigarettes remain legal in the United States today, still in a little pack-shaped box. They are banned in Brazil, in Canada, in Australia, and in Ireland.
Today’s packaging fools anyone who does not know the history. Number 13. A baby in the 1960s and 70s rode in the lap of any passenger, lying on the shelf behind the back seat or loose, rolling across the seat on a sharp turn. An older child stood holding the seat back or sat on the armrest while the car moved at 50 mph.
The child’s seat that existed served only to raise the child up so they could see out the window, not to protect them from anything. The focus was never protection in the event of a real collision. There was no crash test. There was no strength standard and practically no parent saw that accessory as a safety item.
The first federal standard from 1971 regulated only the manufacturing without requiring anyone to use one. It was a pediatrician from Tennessee named Robert Sanders together with his wife who spent years lobbying until the first mandatory use law in the country was passed. In effect, starting in 1978, that specific loophole took years to finally close.
The law was born with a loophole nicknamed babes in arms which still allowed a baby in the lap of another passenger. Sanders Kristoff pushed back in the newspaper saying that not even Iraqi, not even a Tarzan can hold a child in their lap in an impact at 30 mph. The loophole did not fall until 1981.
By 1985, all 50 American states already had a similar law in an extremely short span of less than a decade to become a national norm. The interval between the two dates surprises everyone. Number 14. Every gas station in the 1970s had only one option available at the pump, leaded gasoline. There was no alternative to choose from.
The fuel came mixed with lead since the 1920s, an additive that raised the octane and prevented engine knock. And the characteristic smell of the gas station of that era came precisely from that mixture. Nobody associated it with anything beyond an engine running well. It was treated as a normal part of any gas station.
Every car in motion spread fine lead particles through the air with no choice for the driver. falling on everyone nearby with higher concentration next to a busy avenue and a school by the roadside. In 1973, the average was 2 to three grams of lead per gallon, giving about 200,000 tons thrown into the air per year inside the United States alone.
Study after study began to link this to developmental delay in children. The damage happened slowly with no immediate symptom. The phase out was slow and full of resistance from drivers and gas stations because a lot of people believe that unled gasoline ruined the engine. The first reduction standards came out in 1973.
The car with a catalytic converter arrived in 1975. And by 1995, laded fuel was only 0.6% of total sales. It took a full 23 years of transition to disappear for good from ordinary gas station pumps. The resistance came from drivers, gas stations, and car manufacturers all at once. The definitive ban for street cars took effect starting January 1st, 1996.
But there is one fuel that legally still contains lead to this day. sold at small airport air strips. The gasoline used in piston engine airplanes. The projection to eliminate it is only for 2030, which means 34 years of delay compared to the ordinary passenger car. This strange exception survives to this day without catching the attention of almost any ordinary small plane passenger.
Number 15. Every girl who got an Easy Bake Oven in the 1960s and ‘7s baked a real cake using the heat of an ordinary incandescent light bulb. The same kind that was in the living room at home. The child mixed the batter, put it in the little pan, pushed it in through the side opening, and waited the right amount of time.
The oven was made of colored plastic, operated by an eight-year-old with no constant supervision, and it worked for decades without becoming a scandal. No parent of that generation saw a reason to worry. In 2006, Hasbro decided to modernize the toy to look like a grown-up oven. It removed the light bulb, put in a real electric heating element, and changed the opening from the side to the front, imitating a real stove.
The idea seemed harmless on paper. In practice, the new opening was exactly the right size for a small child’s hand to go in up to the wrist during use and then be unable to come out at all. The mistake was hidden inside the proposed solution itself. The first recall came in February of 2007, covering 985,000 units after 29 reports of a trapped hand and five burns.
The repair kit sent to families homes solved nothing. In July of that same year came the second recall now of 1 million ovens with a complete replacement because the reports had already risen to 249 cases of a trapped hand and 77 recorded burns. The number grew too fast for any company to ignore for long.
Of those 77 burns, 16 were second and third degree, and a 5-year-old girl had part of a finger amputated because doctors could not free her hand from the oven any other way. The most ironic detail, the roughly 25 million old ovens, the ones with a light bulb and a side opening that spent four decades on the market, never needed a single recall.
The irony of the case did not escape anyone who followed the story closely. Number 16. In the 1970s, drivers and passengers simply did not wear seat belts, and nobody thought that was strange. A man in a suit driving to work, a couple going out to dinner at night, a friend catching a ride in the back seat. Everyone rode loose inside the car without buckling anything.
The belt, when it existed, stayed stuffed under the upholstery all year, forgotten. There was no risk of a fine because there was no law about it at all in any of the 50 states of the country. It was not just laziness. A lot of people genuinely believed that the belt was dangerous, capable of trapping the person inside the car in a fire after a crash, and others found the requirement uncomfortable or a government intrusion into each person’s private life.
A newspaper editorial published in 1989 still said with no irony at all that a seat belt law robs the American citizen of his freedom. The fear was truly sincere, even with no technical basis behind it. New York was the first state to require the belt by law in 1984. And even so, real adoption took years to truly grow.
Today, the NATSA calculates that the three-point belt reduces the risk of death in the front seat by 45% and by 60% in pickups and utility vehicles. It took three full decades for buckling the belt to stop being the exception and become an automatic reflex for anyone getting in the car. Today’s habit seems obvious, but it did not come easily for anyone.
Number 17. The X-ray machine for trying on shoes sat inside almost every American shoe store between the 1920s and the 1960s, and children love to use it. You put on the new shoe, climbed onto a wooden box a little over 3 ft tall, and looked through a little hole at the top. Inside, the bone of your own foot appeared glowing green fitted inside the new shoe.
There were three viewing holes, one for the child, one for the mother, one for the salesman, everyone peering in at the same time. The device had almost no shielding. It was an X-ray tube turned on underneath and the customer’s foot sat on top of it, separated only by an aluminum plate 1 millm thick. The salesman who operated the machine several times every day received the highest dose of radiation in there.
In 1950, a survey measured a machine emitting up to 107 runins per minute. And there is a record of a professional shoe model who lost part of a foot after years of testing shoes in that device. Pennsylvania was the first American state to ban the device in 1957. By 1970, 33 states had already banned the machine, but the other 17 had not yet.
Massachusetts banned it officially, and even so, a little corner shop in Boston kept using the device into the late 1970s, letting a child peek at their own foot if they bought 10 cents of candy. The last documented unit still turned on in the United States, was not switched off for good until 1981 at a department store in West Virginia.
Number 18. Houses, schools, toys, and cribs in the 1960s and 70s were painted with paint that contained lead, and nobody thought twice about it. The paint covered well in a single coat did not fade in the sun, and from the point of view of whoever was painting it was simply the best product available on the shelf.
The danger appeared when it started to peel off an old wall, creating a chip with a sweet taste that a small child put straight into their mouth. It was a risk nobody saw. Lead poisoning caused developmental delay, learning difficulties, and damage to internal organs, and the effect was silent.
The child did not suddenly get sick. They simply learned more slowly without anyone suspecting the reason. The first federal law from 1971 only covered property built with public money. The private market, where most of the country’s houses were, remained completely free for years. The risk stayed concentrated where the most people lived.
The final ban came out in 1977, taking effect in February of 1978, dropping the maximum allowed content from 0.5% to 0.06%. The practical rule that American inspectors used to this day is direct. Any wall that has not been repainted after 1977 should be treated as if it has led. Millions of houses still fit that.
And renovation in those properties requires a contractor with specific certification by law. The rule weighs to this day on any old renovation. Number 19. Ice cream, hot dogs, soda, and red candy in the 1970s used a dye called amaranth, the most common red in the American food industry.
In 1970, the FDA learned of a Soviet study linking the dye to cancer and laboratory rats, and the public demanded a fast response. The agency redid the test on the material itself, and the result in humans came back inconclusive without confirming anything for certain. The case exposed the boundary between science and public reaction.
Even so, malignant tumors appeared in female rats, and that was enough for the ban to come out in January of 1976. Mars, the owner of M&M’s, pulled the red candies out of circulation immediately. The curious detail is that the red M&M’s never used that specific die. The company chose to pull them anyway, publicly claiming it was only to avoid confusing the consumer at the moment of purchase.
The explanation never convinced anyone paying attention to the details. The bag was left with only orange, brown, green, and yellow for more than 10 straight years. In 1982, an engineering freshman from Tennessee named Paul Hethman founded the Society for the Restoration of the Red Eminem with a membership card for less than $3, letterhead, and an official envelope.
It reached 500 paying members and more than 5,000 letters received over four years of the campaign. The joke became almost a genuinely organized movement. Mars played along instead of ignoring the student. The company’s public relations man joined the society on his own. Paid the annual dues like any other member and in 1987 wrote to say the red was coming back, sending along in the mail a 48-lb sack of nothing but red candies to Hethmon.
The red M&M’s returned to every package in January of 1987, 11 years after disappearing. The gesture became a good joke inside the company itself. Number 20. An 18-year-old in the early 1970s could walk into an American bar, order a beer at the counter, and nobody questioned anything because in much of the country, that became law and practice after 1971.
The argument that convinced legislator after legislator was simple. If a young man of 18 could be drafted for the Vietnam War and die there, he deserved the right to drink a beer at home before shipping out. The argument seemed fair until the numbers started coming in. Between 1970 and 1975, about 30 states lowered the minimum age to 18, 19, or 20, following that same logic that military adulthood should apply to everything.
By 1982, only 14 states out of 50 still had the limit at 21. In the same period, traffic accidents involving young drivers began to rise consistently, and it grew harder and harder to pretend the two things were unrelated. Social pressure weighed as much as any statistic. Reagan signed the law that reversed everything on July 17th, 1984.
Using a financial trick, any state that did not go back to 21 lost 10% of federal highway funding, money too big for any state to refuse. South Dakota went to court claiming budget blackmail and lost at the Supreme Court in 1987. It gave in in 1988. Wyoming was the last state in the country to reverse course.
Also in 1988, four years after the federal law, Wyoming’s resistance made national newspaper headlines. The NHTSA estimates that the minimum age of 21 prevented close to 32,000 deaths since 1975. Between 1988 and 1995, alcohol-related traffic deaths in the 15 to 20 age range fell 47%, an enormous result for a single change in the law.
No state has tried to lower the limit again since then, even with the original Vietnam argument no longer making the slightest sense decades later. And nobody has ever tried to reopen that specific debate anywhere again. Number 21. Leaving the bar after drinking and getting into the car to drive home was such common behavior in the 1970s that almost nobody saw it as a real crime.
The legal blood alcohol limit in most states was 0.15%, almost double the current standard, a level at which a person already has real trouble walking in a straight line. Many states did not even have an objective law. The prosecutor had to prove an impact on the driving. The test alone was not enough. Proving that was nearly impossible.
On May 3rd, 1980 in California, a 13-year-old girl named Carrie Lightner was struck while walking home from a school event. The driver did not stop, did not slow down, kept on driving. He had three prior convictions for drunk driving and was out on bail from another hit and run that he himself had caused only 2 days before the crash that killed the girl.
The investigation around the case took months to fully close. Her mother, Candy Lightner, founded Mothers Against Drunk Driving in September of that same year at a kitchen table with no structure at all. When the organization was born, 25,000 people died per year in alcohol-related accidents in the United States. The limit dropped over the course of the 1980s, and in 2000, the federal government repeated the drinking age formula, tying highway funding to 0.08%.
Delaware was the last to give in in 2004. The founding of that organization changed the course of the following decade. Number 22. Diet soda in the 1960s had a taste that vanished from the market and most of the people who drink it today have never tried it. The sweetener was cichlamate, about 30 times sweeter than sugar with no calories and without the bitter aftertaste that plagued the competitors.
Tab soda, one of the bestselling of the era in the United States, depended on it for the characteristic flavor that became practically the trademark of the drink. The flavor became an item of nostalgia among those who drank it before. In 1969, a study pointed to bladder tumors in laboratory rats given extremely high doses of the sweetener.
The Delaney clause of American law was categorical with no room for interpretation. Any additive that caused cancer in an animal at any dose had to be banned. Period. The United States banned cyclamate back in 1969 and it came off the shelves for good in 1970 without ceremony. The law left no room at all for a common sense exception.
The industry rushed to saccharine, which left a bitter aftertaste and needed a little sugar to disguise it, adding calories to a product that was supposed to be diet. The rest of the world simply did not follow the American decision. Cyclamate remains legal in Canada and in much of Europe to this day. Later studies question the scientific basis of that 1969 ban, and even so, it has never been reversed in the United States.
The difference in rules bothers scientists to this day. Number 23. The couch of the 1970s and 80s. That thick padded living room piece came loaded with flame retardant chemicals inside the foam, even in a home that had never had a fire near any furniture. The origin was a 1975 California standard called a technical bulletin 117, requiring the foam to resist 12 seconds of direct flame.
Since nobody manufactures a couch just for one state, the rule became the standard for all of North America. No other state passed anything similar on its own. The only practical way to pass the test was to soak the foam in PBDE compounds. And a typical couch left the factory with more than 2 lbs of that material inside the padding.
In 2003, a study found PBDE in the breast milk of American mothers, spread through the entire chain of household exposure. The EPA classifies these compounds as persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic both to humans and to the surrounding environment. The study alarmed mothers who had never known about their own exposure.
The detail that brings the whole thing down is that the standard never worked the way it promised. The outer fabric of the couch catches fire first, and the resulting flame consumes the foam underneath, even when it is treated with the chemical. Study after study showed that furniture with and without the retardant burns in practically the same way.
California revised the rule only in 2013, taking effect for new furniture starting in 2015. The old rule, the one that did not work, lasted 38 full years. The revision came too late to reverse decades of use.
