To: California Lawmakers
From: The Rest of Us
Re: Get These Flame Retardants Out of My House

So, you were lied to. We get it – we’ve been lied to sometimes too. But now, thanks to the Chicago Tribune series "Playing with Fire," you know how you were played.

You know how the chemical industry made up fake facts about dead babies to dramatize its lies. You know about the chemical industry’s front group, Citizens for Fire Safety, and its ties to people, tactics and strategies used by Big Tobacco.

And thanks to testing by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, you also know that chemical flame retardants don’t do anything to make a fire safer, but make it more toxic and dangerous. In other words, they don’t help.

Instead, they poison our children, multiplying their risk of cancer by seven. They get into the dust and air inside our homes, and then into our bodies and blood. They are linked to birth defects, lowered IQ and fertility and other serious health problems. Your own state of California just declared that one kind of chemical flame retardant, TDCPP, is a “probable carcinogen” under Proposition 65.

You have a right to protect the health and safety of people in California. And you are often a national leader, an example for the country.

But here’s our question on this one: what gives you the right, now that you know the truth, to keep poisoning all of us for no reason? How can you spend one more day as a lawmaker and not move to rescind Technical Bulletin 117, the rule on chemical flame retardants in furniture?

We want to believe in you. We want to believe that now you know the truth, you wouldn’t continue to do this to us and to our families.

But we really do need you to act today to repeal this disgusting and dangerous law. Show us that about this at least, we’re not wrong to think that truth will lead the way.