Kamala Harris Now Opposes Plastic Straw Bans. America’s Dumbest Moral Panic Is Finally Over.
When they needed her most, presidential candidate Kamala Harris wanted to ban plastic straws. Now that the mania about banning plastic straws has subsided, she says they can remain a legal product.
An unnamed campaign staffer told Axios reporter Alex Thompson yesterday that Harris, contra a 2019 statement, no longer supports banning plastic straws. Even when she did, the staffer told Thompson, “she joked even then about how crappy paper straws are and the need to come up with better eco-friendly alternatives.”
Indeed, she did.
During her brief presidential run in 2019, Harris described the unpleasantness of using a paper straw to CNN’s Erin Burnett in graphic detail, saying “If you don’t gulp it down immediately it starts to bend and then, you know, [awkward laughter] the little thing catches it.”
Nevertheless, Harris told Burnett in the same interview that she supported banning superior plastic alternatives.
Hard as it is to believe here in 2024, plastic straw bans were briefly the hot policy sweeping the nation.
A number of big, blue cities prohibited restaurants and bars from giving plastic straws to their customers. Harris’ old stomping ground of San Francisco went even further by banning all businesses from distributing not just plastic straws, but also plastic cocktail swords, stirrer sticks, and other single-use plastic items.
Other cities and states adopted “straw on request” laws that required customers to ask for a straw before they could be given one.
The straw panic, as Reason first reported in 2018, was kicked off by the research of then-9-year-old Milo Cress, who created the viral statistic that Americans use 500 million straws a day. More credible estimates from market analysts put the country’s straw usage a
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