Illinois Lawmakers Join The "Skittles Ban" Movement

America’s Lawyer E86: Illinois could become the latest state in the country to enact what is called a “Skittles Ban”, which is legislation that would ban harmful chemicals from popular foods and candies. The largest power company in the state of Alabama has purchased their own “news websites” to help spread propaganda and to downplay the health risks of the toxins that they are dumping in the state. And a new report suggests that major grocery store chains are propping up human trafficking as a way to score cheap labor. All that, and more is coming up, so don’t go anywhere – America’s Lawyer starts right now.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Hi, I'm Mike Papantonio, and this is America's Lawyer. Illinois could become the latest state in the country to enact what's called the Skittles ban, which is legislation that would ban harmful chemicals from popular foods and candies. The largest power company in the state of Alabama has purchased their own news website to help spread propaganda and downplay the health risk of the toxins that they're pumping into the state. And new reports, they suggest that major grocery store chains are propping up human trafficking as a way to score cheap labor. All that and more, it's coming up. Don't go anywhere. America's Lawyer starts right now.

Lawmakers in Illinois have proposed legislation that would ban five different chemicals in food, all of which have been linked to serious health problems in human beings. And most of the chemicals, well, they were banned overseas for decades. I've got Farron Cousins with me to talk about this story and many more stories. Farron, this Skittles, we did this story how long ago?

God, I think it's been a couple years, really.

Oh, two or three years ago. And what we started seeing is we started seeing that this is Japan, Asia, was banning Skittles. Europe was banning Skittles. And so we took a deep look into it and said, why? And it's because they figured out that the additives that were going in this would cause cancer, all kinds of chronic disease, ADHD, and FDA ignored it as they usually do. They totally ignored it because industry was pumping so much money into the FDA.

Yeah. Europe was big on just immediately getting rid of these chemicals. And like you said, we've got cancers, we've got cognitive disorders, we've got nervous system disorders, reproductive issues. I mean, across the board, any horrible thing you could imagine as a side effect of a chemical is listed for these five chemicals. And the common places you find 'em, Skittles, PEZ, Peeps, Sun Drop sodas, any kind of colorful candy or or sweet type thing, whether it's a beverage or a food, most likely has at least some of these chemicals. And what really got me about this story is that the US banned it from cosmetics in the nineties.

Right.

But not from consuming it.

Not from kids candy.

Right.

In other words, the FDA says, oh, well, we're gonna make some movement here, but we're not gonna interfere with the food industry. Well, if you do anybody watching this, if you take a look at brominated vegetable oil or potassium bromate, or take a look at red dye number three, and you're gonna see that this is really bad stuff. And not only that, we've known it was bad stuff for a long, long time. This isn't guesswork. The scientists, the clinicals on this stuff have been around forever. So how did it make it this far for so long?

Well, again, I think you kind of nailed it there, is we have a regulatory system that is completely captured by the industry. So let's compare, you know, over in Europe what it takes for something to be taken off the market in Europe is suspicion. If we suspect that this could be causing negative health effects, we remove it, then we run our tests, so that nobody in the interim gets hurt. We'll run our tests. If it's safe, hey, welcome back. If not, ha, we told you so. We gotta do something else. In the US, we wait, we wait and wait and wait and then we test.