California Moves to Criminalize Drinking Straws

It isn’t mandatory for waiters to offer a straw with your drink in California, yet strangely it isn’t forbidden. But soon it will be:

[Ian] Calderon, the Democratic majority leader in California’s lower house, has introduced a bill to stop sit-down restaurants from offering customers straws with their beverages unless they specifically request one. Under Calderon’s law, a waiter who serves a drink with an unrequested straw in it would face up to 6 months in jail and a fine of up to $1,000.

Like so many other harmless aspects of our lives, straws have been denounced by progressives as offensive to the planet.

Wacky and tyrannical as Calderon may be, he isn’t alone:

The California cities of San Luis Obispo and Davis both passed straws-on-request laws last year, and Manhattan Beach maintains a prohibition on all disposable plastics. And up in Seattle, food service businesses won’t be allowed to offer plastic straws or utensils as of July.

Straws are also a threat to public health:

The Los Angeles Times has gotten behind the movement, endorsing straws-on-request policies in an editorial that also warned that “repetitive sucking may cause or exacerbate wrinkles on the lips or around the mouth.”

Increasingly socialized healthcare costs mean it is everyone’s business if individuals risk getting wrinkles from using straws.

Propagandists who want us to get hysterical about the threat posed by straws (e.g., CNN, San Francisco Chronical) screech that Americans use half a billion of them per day. A boy named Milo Crest came up with this figure for his Be Straw Free campaign when he was 9 years old, and it went viral.

How will we drink our drinks without straws?

Squishy moderates on the straw issue have pushed paper straws, which come compostable at only eight times the price. Eco-Cycle skews a bit more radical, with their “Be Straw Free” campaign—sponsored in part by reusable straw makers—that urges the adoption of glass or steel straws. Because we all know how good steel smelting is for the environment.

Never mind the environment. The issue is never the issue. The issue is always liberal weenies dictating each picayune aspect of everyone’s existence.

Young Milo, now 16, offers some insight:

“If people are forced not to use straws, then they won’t necessarily see that it’s for the environment,” he tells Reason. “They’ll just think it’s just another inconvenience imposed on them by government.”

Who knows? Maybe this will be the last straw that finally gets people pushing back against tyrannical enviromoonbattery.

On tips from J, Chronos Z. Wonderpig, KirklesWorth, Stormfax, Artfldr, and TCS III.