Earlier this year, the tobacco industry paid to run advertisements informing us that tobacco is a dangerous and addictive drug. This was the consequence, such as it was, of decades-long litigation (which is in some sense still ongoing), and it bookended the moment, culturally, of the fight to get “big tobacco” to concede that yes, indeed, their product kills people. That moment might be said to have begun when tobacco execs lifted their hands to swear before Congress that they did not believe it.
Could this same process one day face “big coffee”? Not likely.
Due to the presence of acrylamide, a probable cancer-causing agent, a superior court judge ruled, in March, that cups of coffee had to come with a cancer warning notice, making coffee a casualty of the bigger fight to regulate toxic chemicals and inform the public of possible health consequences.
That ruling was upheld the other week.
Despite a deluge of articles pointing out the apparent absurdity of this ruling, it is worth remembering that this warning does not claim that drinking coffee will cause cancer. It merely alerts consumers to the presence of acrylamide in coffee, which is present once coffee beans have been roasted. In other words, this is not equatable with the anti-smoking measures taken up by the state, which are aggressive by US standards.
That said, the warning is both tone deaf and trivializes the cancer warning system. It perhaps flippantly threatens to draw spurious connections between cancer warnings for substances that probably will cause cancer when used a lot, like menthol cigarettes (which, incidentally, San Francisco is looking to outright ban), and something like coffee which seems unlikely to cause cancer despite the presence of a substance in some way connected to cancer.
If the standard for cancer warnings is that low, then virtually anything sails in under the banner. Perhaps California should rig up signs at the state lines: “WARNING: breathing our smog-tainted air might cause cancer. Drinking our poorly filtered water may increase the chances of perhaps, possibly causing cancer. Welcome to California.”
Confessions of a Caffeine Addict 