Warning: Can stain clothes: On California's run-amok health warnings

Never mind the coffee in California; something in the water there is driving people crazy.

To be more specific, it’s a 1986 law, Proposition 65, with a noble purpose: informing the public when any of 900 chemicals known to cause cancer, birth defects or other reproductive harm are present in the foods we eat or the places we visit.

But like so often, a decent idea has morphed without reason into an idiotically blunt instrument.

Because the law is so broad, the warnings now are evvvverywhere. They’re there when you pump your gas. When you buy your filet of salmon. When you step into a parking lot — and not because you could get hit by a car.

When everything’s a risk, nothing’s a risk.

And the two chunky fine-print paragraphs in the state mandated WARNING signs contain no context, no information on relative danger, no data on how much potentially dangerous stuff is in the product. Just scary words about how life could kill you.

Now a judge has to decide whether to slap the label on coffee.

Coffee, which about 80% of American adults drink. Which many studies say is good for you — limiting diabetes risk, rate of liver cancer progression, gallstones, Parkinson’s and more.

In addition to, you know, getting you through the morning.

It’s not the caffeine that’s at issue; it’s a chemical called acrylamide, a byproduct produced during the roasting process that’s also in potato chips and french fries.

It occurs in coffee in trace amounts that are of no risk to anyone.

Who writes warning signs to inform the public about the psychological and sociological damage done by a state government that doesn’t know when to stop labeling things?