Kinder Surprise and other idiotic US bans
So here's something that baffles me about this country. We have a really shoddy safety record when it comes to a lot of domestic products or even imports from China. Yet we have some really idiotic bans on innocuous products, mainly foreign imports that have either been proven safe or have a safety record better than most products. Some examples of this are sheep lungs (for human consumption), all legal forms of absinthe and absinth, fugu that's either farm raised or has been certified butchered (you can currently only legally import fugu if you have a license and are employed in cooking it) and others.
To me, the ban and draconian enforcement on kinder surprise seems the most idiotic. For those who don't know, kinder surprise is a chocolate candy made by Ferraro consisting of either a chocolate shell with a plastic egg and toy inside or a plastic egg with one half chocolate and one half sealed toy. Now there may be some issues with choking as safety but the counter argument to that would be that
1. There's a big label saying that the candy isn't for children under 3.
2. Ferraro's been around for quite a few decades, they make a lot of popular products including Nutella and for all their sales, there have only reportedly been 7 child deaths in their entire history. Compare that to Happy Meals or US toys that are still on the market. Maybe I'm being insensitive but considering that it's a cheap children's candy that's been on the market for around 35 years, 7 out of something like 1 billion seems like a pretty damn good safety record.
The most stunning thing is that though you can find it in some US stores, the police and courts have been going outside of their jurisdiction with some cases being reported of people being fined $300 FOR POSSESSION. This isn't a controlled substance or serious contraband. It's a ****ing chocolate.
And just as a double standard, Nestle Wonderballs were a similar concept that were allowed until someone pointed it out. So Nestle changed the design to instead incorporate no plastic egg and no toy, but irregularly shaped, sweet tart-typed candies inside which are easy to choke on.
Thoughts?