In what will no doubt come as a relief to everyone who is reading this column, as of Aug. 14, 2009, you will no longer need to fear for the lives of seventh graders who feel the need to suck on their bicycles like lollipops.

This is because of a wonderful new law called the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008.

The CPSIA regulates the lead and phthalate content in children’s products, defined as “consumer product[s] designed or intended primarily for children 12 years of age or younger.”

As of Aug. 14, the CPSIA mandates the lead content in paint used in children’s products must be no higher than 90 parts per million. It also mandates the overall lead content may be no more than 300 ppm.

This applies to every product produced, so if a company manufactures 100 different types of toys all using the same plastic and paint, each of the 100 types of products would still have to be tested separately, rather than just the plastic and the paint, according to Greenebaum Breakthrough Law firm.

Although making sure products designed for 3-year-olds are lead-free may seem like a worthy goal, it seems somewhat overzealous to extend the same regulations to products designed for 12-year-olds.

To make sure this happens, manufacturers will be required to get their products tested by a third party and obtain a certificate of conformity — all of this at their own expense, of course.

Unfortunately, complaining about overregulation is more likely to lead to a letter from Assistant Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin, D-Illi., than to less regulation.

As Durbin wrote in a March 27 letter to Nancy Nord, the acting chairwoman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, “Recent comments you have made in the press and in letters to Congress regarding the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) show your continued resistance to modernizing your agency and addressing the genuine public concern over unsafe products.”

Basically, Congress keeps saying the CPSC needs to grant exceptions to the act, while the CPSC says Congress has not given it the authority to make any reasonable exceptions to the act.

And in the meantime, children become illiterate because bookstores can’t prove the books they sell aren’t poisonous.

Of course, valuable services such as protecting children from poisonous books don’t come for free. To help enforce the CPSIA, $43 million has been added to the CPSC’s budget.

The purpose of the CPSC is to “[protect] the public against unreasonable risks of injury and death associated with consumer products.”

Although toy manufacturers, taxpayers and consumers may disagree, government bureaucrats apparently don’t believe it’s reasonable to assume 12-year-olds won’t try to eat their toys.

That being said, my computer is looking a bit tasty right now, so I think I’m going to chew on it for awhile.

 — Blake Hasenmiller is a senior in industrial engineering and economics from De Witt.