Legislation seeks to ban sale of jewelry with high lead levels
Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune
The lead-poisoning death of a 4-year-old boy prompted the bill, one of several seeking to reduce the health threat.
Jewelry retailers would be prohibited from selling items that contain high levels of lead under a bill proposed Monday by Senate and House DFLers.
The legislation was prompted by recent news reports about the death last month of 4-year-old Jarnell Brown, a Minneapolis boy who swallowed a charm bracelet that had high lead content.
“Last month’s tragedy needs to serve as an alarm for all of us,” said state Rep. Keith Ellison, DFL-Minneapolis, who for several years has been advocating legislation aimed at the health threats posed by lead, especially in poor and low-income neighborhoods.
Ellison said that about 80 to 100 people a year in Minnesota, mostly children in urban areas, are treated for some form of lead poisoning. The ban on high-lead jewelry is one of only five pieces of legislation aimed at curbing the lead threat, including the creation of a lead prevention program within the Department of Health and a measure to provide more screening.
Low levels of lead poisoning, which often go undetected, are “tightly connected to the learning problems of low-income children in poor neighborhoods,” Ellison said. A chief culprit is lead-based paint in older homes, which children sometimes eat or touch.
Most of the lead-based costume jewelry is in dollar stores and other low-price outlets, sponsors said, and it typically is not a big problem in high-end jewelry stores. The ban is modeled on legislation in New York and California, they said.
Bruce (Buzz) Anderson, a lobbyist for the Minnesota Retailers Association, said that “no retailer wants to sell something to the public that’s dangerous. But I haven’t had a chance to study the workability of the bill.” He added that he thought the national publicity over the case would lead retailers to do more research and self-policing on their own.
The legislation probably stands a good chance in the DFL-controlled Senate but may face more resistance in the Republican-controlled House. House Majority Leader Erik Paulsen, R-Eden Prairie, said he thought it was “certainly appropriate to look at ways to prevent this” but that the bill “will have to go through the committee process.”
The item that the Minneapolis boy swallowed was a trinket given away with a pair of Reebok shoes. On learning of the death, Reebok immediately asked all stores to pull the bracelets from its shoeboxes and for customers who already had purchased shoes to destroy the trinket. The company has said that it is investigating the matter.
