Viewpoint: How to best regulate chemicals? ‘Precautions employed to regulate tiny, sometimes nonexistent risks can cause real harm’

For virtually everything in life, we face decisions about whether we should “sweat the small stuff.” No doubt, most may have encountered a boss who micromanages us with useless reports and we wonder why they don’t have something better to do. People cut you off in traffic, your spouse bites their nails or cracks their knuckles, and you cringe about whether to say anything. Businesses must allow a small amount of shoplifting because it is too expensive to stop it all. We learn to ignore small insults so that we can focus on larger harms. One current example is regulation of so-called “forever chemicals.”

Chemical regulation is where we have one of the most vexing problems with “the small stuff.” Right now, EPA has begun to regulate PFOS/PFOA in drinking water which is likely to be the largest financially impactful regulation since environmental regulation began 60 years ago. The EPA’s maximum allowable level is 5 parts per trillion (like 5 drops in a swimming pool). This is over 100,000 times less than the level Australia/New Zealand has set and lower than every other country. There are 800 to 12,000 PFAS chemicals and the cost to regulate them is likely to run into trillions of dollars. At best, we have an association, not causation for PFAS chemicals and cancer and blood levels of PFAS have been declining over time. Despite calling it a “forever chemical,” the half-life for PFOA is less than 2 years.

When we go to lower and lower exposure levels of chemicals, we get to a point where the dose is so low that it does not poison anyone, one definition for a “threshold.” The main reason for this is that we are resilient, we have had to evolve that way to survive and thrive. In fact, exposure to small amounts of toxins has been essential for all life. Each cell “in the human body receives tens of thousands of DNA lesions from both our own metabolism and the environment every single day that must be repaired by the body.

Simply saying, as for example air laws say, that the levels may be “requisite to protect the public health with an adequate margin of safety,” is unhelpful.  Neither is the legal concept, de minimis non curat lex, the law does not concern itself with trifles.

Just as with our daily choices about the small stuff, toxicology (poison) regulation also forces us to make choices involving trade-offs.

One way to think about whether something is too small to be concerned about is the economic concept of “opportunity cost.” Those are the benefits you give up when you make one choice instead of another. Three lost benefits when we choose to address small stuff, e.g., exceptionally low doses include:

1. Resources—For example, when governments addresses small problems, like the Department of Energy regulating microwave clocks to go on only when the door is open, their resources might be better spent revising nuclear energy regulations. 
2. Wealth—When the government spends substantial amounts of consumer wealth to address small risks, those resources could be better spent by consumers addressing risks in their own life. Expenditures on healthier food and exercise at gyms is likely to do more for health than eliminating any trace of a food additive that causes cancer only at high doses in animals.
3. Risk—Replacing something that is very low risk can lead to something more dangerous. It could also be case that something that was risky at high doses, is helpful (hormetic) at low doses and taking it away removes the helpful dose. Water is dangerous at high doses, drink too much too fast and you die, but it’s necessary at low doses. Regulating down to tiny amounts of some pesticides increases the price of fruits and vegetables leading to lower consumption of them and higher risks.

A better way to approach this issue is that we should “not regulate to levels that are so low that it more likely will do more harm than good.” We could ensure that government resources are focused on bigger harms, that we allow private resources to reduce larger risks, or cause greater harm from risk replacements.

Precautions employed to regulate tiny, sometimes nonexistent risks can cause harm. We see this in court cases where alternative causes of disease are ignored or when there are small amounts of chemicals that are unlikely to be the actual cause of harm.

We shouldn’t sweat, regulate, or litigate the small stuff, it’s too likely to cause overall harm.

Richard Williams is a Senior Affiliated Scholar, the former Director of the Regulatory Studies Program, and the former Vice President of Policy Research at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He is also the author of Fixing Food: An FDA Insider Unravels the Myths and the Solutions.  Follow Richard on X @RAWilliamsfood