19 things that are actually banned in the U.S.

Most people assume a ban means something is dangerous. In the U.S., that is rarely the whole story. Plenty of ordinary foods, drinks, and household products are restricted for reasons that have little to do with obvious hazard. The trigger might be a packaging rule written in 1938, an import regulation covering livestock organs, or a minimum aging period for cheese that crosses state lines. The result is a patchwork of things banned in the U.S. that would raise no eyebrows in much of the rest of the world.

It helps to separate the categories first. Some bans are federal and apply everywhere, enforced by agencies such as the FDA, USDA, DEA, and EPA. The authority comes from statutes including the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Endangered Species Act. Others are written state by state. A product that cannot legally be sold in California or New York may sit on a shelf in Texas or Ohio without issue. A third category covers interstate commerce only: a food can be legal to produce and sell inside one state while being barred from crossing a state line.

Blurring those three categories is the most common error in conversations about American bans, and it explains how a product can be called illegal and still be widely available. It also explains why a few of these restrictions are not bans in the strict legal sense. Horse meat is not outlawed to eat; Congress simply stopped funding the inspections that make commercial slaughter legal.

The entries that follow name the specific agency, statute, or state law behind each restriction, and spell out whether it applies nationwide, regionally, or only to goods moving between states. Some date back nearly a century. One was finalized in 2025 and does not take full effect until 2027. Together they show that the line between legal and illegal in American consumer life often runs through narrow regulatory language rather than through any clear public danger.

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Kinder Surprise eggs — the hollow chocolate shell with a plastic capsule and toy inside — cannot legally be sold in the U.S. The ban rests on the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938, which treats a confection with a non-nutritive object embedded inside it as adulterated.

The law does not single out chocolate or toys. It targets one arrangement: an inedible item fully encased in something a person is meant to eat, with nothing separating the two. The FDA and U.S. Customs and Border Protection read that as a choking risk, mainly for young children who cannot tell that part of what they are holding is not food. Adulterated, in food law, is a legal classification rather than a verdict on the ingredients, and the label alone is enough to keep a product off American shelves.

The same technical line explains why a close relative of the candy sells openly in U.S. supermarkets. Kinder Joy divides the package into two sealed halves — one holding a sweet cream and a small plastic spoon, the other holding the toy. The toy never sits inside the food, so the 1938 provision does not reach it, and Ferrero brought that format to American stores in 2018.

The restriction is federal, so no state offers a workaround, and it covers personal imports as well as commercial shipments. Travelers $TRV buy the eggs in Canada, Mexico, and across Europe, where they sit near the checkout like any other candy, then lose them at the border. Commercial importers face fines rather than a simple confiscation.

The age of the statute sets this case apart. The provision predates Kinder Surprise by more than three decades, written when American candy makers sometimes buried cheap prizes and trinkets in their products. A rule aimed at a long-gone style of confection now governs a chocolate egg sold in dozens of countries, and it has pushed the manufacturer to engineer a separate product just to reach American shoppers.

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Authentic Scottish haggis has been shut out of the U.S. since 1971, when the USDA prohibited food products containing livestock lung. Lung is a defining ingredient in the traditional recipe, so the dish has been blocked at the border for more than 50 years under a federal rule that never names haggis.

The regulation covers any meat product made with lung tissue, whatever the cuisine or country of origin. The reasoning is tied to slaughter and inspection practice: lung tissue can take on fluids during processing in ways that complicate verification under standard federal meat inspection. Rather than set conditions for individual products, the USDA barred the organ outright.

That leaves Scottish exporters no legal route into the American market for unaltered haggis. The restriction is federal and nationwide, so it does not vary by state the way many other entries on this list do, and it applies to commercial shipments and individual travelers alike. Declaring a tin of haggis at customs generally means losing it.

American butchers and specialty producers build the recipe around sheep heart, liver, and oatmeal, leaving lung out. Those products are legal to make and sell domestically, and Scottish-American groups serve them at Burns Night suppers each January, the traditional occasion for the dish. The substitution changes the result — lung is lighter and more porous than the other organ meats, and it shapes the crumbly texture the original is known for.

Scottish producers and trade officials have pressed U.S. regulators to revisit the rule on and off for decades, pointing to modern testing standards and to the fact that haggis is eaten routinely in the U.K. The question has surfaced alongside broader U.S.-U.K. agricultural talks without producing a change. The lung prohibition remains on the books, making haggis one of the longest-running U.S. import bans tied to a single ingredient rather than a whole food category.

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Sassafras oil and the safrole it contains have been barred from use as food additives in the U.S. since 1960, when the FDA determined that safrole caused liver tumors in laboratory animals. The ban is federal and nationwide, and it ended the use of genuine sassafras as the flavoring base for root beer.

Safrole occurs naturally in the root bark of the sassafras tree, which grows across the eastern U.S. and supplied the flavor for teas, tonics, and the soft drink that became root beer. The taste people associate with that drink came directly from the oil. Once animal testing linked safrole to liver cancer, the FDA removed it from the list of substances generally recognized as safe, and beverage makers had to reach the same flavor by another route.

The replacement was safrole-free sassafras extract, made by stripping the carcinogenic compound out of the oil during processing. That extract remains legal and is still used. Many commercial root beers lean on artificial flavoring instead, or on wintergreen, vanilla, and anise notes layered to approximate the original profile. A label mentioning sassafras is not evidence of a violation — what matters is whether safrole is still present.

Sassafras leaves have a separate life in American cooking. Ground sassafras leaf, sold as filé powder, is a standard thickener in Louisiana gumbo, and the leaf carries far less safrole than the root bark, where the compound concentrates. Dried root bark is still sold in the U.S., often labeled for purposes other than eating or brewing, and tea made from it at home delivers safrole in amounts nobody is measuring.

Safrole also carries a second legal status that has nothing to do with food. The DEA lists it as a List I chemical because it can be used to synthesize MDMA, so bulk purchases and transfers are recorded and reported to the agency. A flavoring compound that once defined an American soft drink now sits in two unrelated regulatory files at once.

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Absinthe containing more than trace amounts of thujone cannot be legally sold in the U.S. The anise-flavored spirit was effectively barred from 1912 until 2007, and bottles sold today must test below 10 parts per million of thujone under rules administered by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau.

Thujone is a compound present in wormwood, the botanical that gives absinthe its name and its bitter edge. Early 20th-century campaigns against the drink leaned on claims that it caused hallucinations, violent behavior, and insanity among heavy drinkers. Switzerland wrote a ban into its constitution in 1908 and France followed in 1915, while the American restriction arrived in 1912 through a federal food inspection decision.

Thujone levels in surviving pre-ban bottles proved far lower than that rhetoric assumed. The more plausible explanation for what physicians of the era described is the spirit's alcohol content, which commonly ran between 55% and 70% by volume — far stronger than the wine most French drinkers were used to.

The ban held for 95 years regardless. It lifted in 2007, once federal regulators settled on a measurable thujone threshold that producers could test against, and absinthe returned to American shelves for the first time in several generations.

Any bottle labeled absinthe in a U.S. liquor store has been formulated and laboratory-verified to sit under the 10 ppm ceiling. Federal labeling rules go further and bar claims suggesting the drink produces psychoactive or hallucinogenic effects, so brands are sold on flavor and history rather than on any promise of what wormwood does to the drinker.

The restriction is federal, set through alcohol labeling and import regulation rather than by individual states, so it works the same way in every part of the country. Importers bringing in European brands must document compliance before a shipment clears, and distillers producing absinthe domestically submit their products to the same testing standard.

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Fresh, unprocessed ackee is barred from import into the U.S. by the FDA because the unripe fruit contains hypoglycin, a toxin that can trigger a severe illness known as Jamaican vomiting sickness. Canned ackee that has been processed and inspected is legal, and it sells openly in American grocery stores.

Ackee is the national fruit of Jamaica and the base of ackee and saltfish, the country's national dish. The toxin concentrates in the seeds and in the arils — the fleshy yellow lobes that make up the edible portion — before the fruit matures. As ackee ripens on the tree, the pods split open on their own, and hypoglycin levels in the arils fall to a range considered safe once the fruit is cleaned and cooked properly.

Natural splitting is the ripeness signal the whole tradition depends on, and it is also what makes the fruit hard to regulate. A pod forced open early, or fruit harvested before it opens, can carry a toxic load that cooking will not remove. Confirming ripeness across commercial shipments of fresh fruit is difficult at a port of entry, which is why the FDA has addressed ackee through import controls rather than a consumer advisory.

Processed ackee removes that uncertainty. Canneries sort and inspect the fruit before sealing it, and canned ackee from approved processors enters the U.S. legally. It appears routinely in Caribbean markets and in the international aisles of larger supermarkets, usually packed in brine.

The restriction is federal and works the same way in every state, which separates it from the state-by-state entries elsewhere on this list. The practical consequence falls hardest on travelers. Someone flying home from Kingston with fresh ackee for a family meal can have it taken at customs, even in small quantities and even when the fruit looks fully ripe, because the rule governs the category rather than the individual pod. Declaring it changes nothing; the import status stays the same.

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Eating horse meat is not illegal in the U.S. Producing it commercially is what cannot be done: Congress has withheld funding for the federal inspections required to slaughter horses for food since 2007, and no plant can legally sell the meat without them.

That makes this restriction different from an outright prohibition. No statute declares horse meat unsafe or unfit to eat. The Federal Meat Inspection Act requires a USDA inspector to be present whenever an animal is slaughtered for human consumption. Lawmakers have used the annual appropriations process to bar the agency from spending any money on horse slaughter inspection. A company can secure permits and build a facility and still have no legal route to market, because the inspector is never funded to show up.

The funding prohibition has not run unbroken. It lapsed for a period beginning in 2011, and operators in New Mexico and Missouri moved to open or reopen horse slaughter plants before the restriction returned and lawsuits stalled their plans. Congress has renewed the language in subsequent spending bills, leaving the outcome unchanged even though the mechanism itself is temporary by design.

American horses still end up as meat, just not inside the country. Animals are shipped to slaughter facilities in Mexico and Canada, and the meat is sold for consumption abroad. Horse advocacy groups have campaigned against that export trade for years. An opposing argument in the same policy debate holds that closing domestic plants moved the practice beyond U.S. oversight rather than ending it.

Consumption patterns elsewhere show how narrow the American position is. Horse meat sits in butcher cases and on restaurant menus in France, Japan, and Kazakhstan, where it is treated as an ordinary protein. Within the U.S. it is lawful to eat, lawful to possess, and all but unavailable through commercial channels.

Because the restriction rests on appropriations language rather than permanent agency rulemaking, it could be undone in a single budget cycle. A Congress that left the funding ban out of a spending bill would restore the inspection pathway without passing any new law.

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The caffeinated version of Four Loko left American shelves in late 2010, after the FDA notified its maker and several competitors that caffeine was an unsafe additive in alcoholic beverages. Phusion Projects reformulated rather than fight an enforcement action, pulling out caffeine, guarana, and taurine while leaving the alcohol content alone.

The agency's objection concerned the interaction, not either ingredient on its own. Stimulants can blunt the drowsiness and loss of coordination that normally signal how drunk a person is, without lowering blood alcohol concentration or reducing actual impairment. A drinker can feel alert enough to keep going, or to drive, while being substantially intoxicated.

Four Loko attracted the most scrutiny because of its packaging. It arrived in a tall, brightly colored single-serving can at a high alcohol content, sold cheaply and styled in a way that read as a soft drink to many buyers. Hospitalizations among college students in the fall of 2010, including a widely reported incident at Central Washington University, pushed the product into national news and prompted several states to move toward their own bans before federal regulators acted.

The November 2010 warning letters went to four makers of caffeinated alcoholic drinks rather than to Four Loko alone, and products including Joose and Moonshot faced the same demand. Each of those companies either changed the recipe or exited the category. The original formula cannot legally be produced or sold anywhere in the country today.

The brand itself survived. Cans sold now carry a similar alcohol content to the earlier version but contain none of the added stimulants that defined it, which means a drinker buying Four Loko today is buying a different product under the same label. The restriction is federal rather than state-level, since it rests on the FDA's authority over substances added to food and drink — one of the few entries on this list that erased a specific recipe nationwide while leaving the brand on the shelf.

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Casu marzu, the Sardinian sheep's milk cheese fermented with live fly larvae inside it, cannot be legally imported into or sold in the U.S. FDA rules treat live insect larvae in a consumable product as adulteration, whether the larvae got there by tradition or by accident.

The cheese begins as pecorino. Producers leave the wheels exposed so the cheese fly, Piophila casei, can lay eggs in the rind. The larvae hatch and tunnel through the paste, breaking down fats and leaving a soft, weeping, sharply pungent interior that Sardinians have eaten for generations. Some eaters scrape the larvae off first. Others do not.

That production method is the part U.S. law has no mechanism to accommodate. Federal food regulation sets defect action levels for insect fragments in products such as flour and canned goods, tolerating the trace contamination that cannot be eliminated at industrial scale. A cheese defined by a living insect population falls well outside those limits, and no exemption exists for culinary heritage.

The restriction is federal and applies at every port of entry, so no state offers a legal path around it. Customs officers can seize the cheese from luggage, and a traveler who declares it should expect to lose it.

Sardinian producers face obstacles at home too. European Union hygiene regulations have long made commercial sale difficult, pushing casu marzu into informal channels — shepherds making it for themselves, for neighbors, or for sale outside ordinary retail. Sardinia has recognized it as a traditional regional food product, a designation that does not override EU food-safety rules.

The practical result is a cheese that is difficult to buy through legitimate retail even in its home region and unavailable through legal channels in the U.S. It does not turn up in American cheese shops or importer catalogs. Anyone offering it for sale within the country is selling a product the FDA classifies as adulterated.

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Selling shark fins is illegal nationwide under the Shark Fin Sales Elimination Act, which Congress passed inside the defense authorization bill signed in December 2022. Before that, the restriction ran state by state, with more than a dozen states — California, New York, and Texas among them — writing their own bans.

The federal statute makes it unlawful to possess, buy, sell, or transport shark fins or any product containing them, with narrow exceptions. Spiny dogfish are carved out. So are fins taken lawfully and held for research, education, or display. The law aims at the commercial trade rather than shark fishing, which stays under separate federal fishery management rules.

Shark fins are the central ingredient in shark fin soup, a dish tied to Chinese banquet tradition and served at weddings and formal celebrations. Demand for the fins drove the practice known as finning, in which the fins are sliced off at sea and the rest of the animal is dumped overboard, often while the shark is still alive.

Congress had addressed that practice earlier. The Shark Finning Prohibition Act of 2000 outlawed finning in U.S. waters, and the Shark Conservation Act of 2010 tightened the rule by requiring that sharks be brought to shore with their fins still naturally attached.

Those laws governed how sharks could be caught, not whether fins could be bought and sold. State legislatures moved to close that gap through the 2010s, with California's ban phasing in from 2012, on the reasoning that eliminating the American market would cut demand no matter where a fin was taken.

What remains is a layered structure. Federal law now sets a nationwide floor, while the older state statutes stay on the books with their own exemptions and penalties. A dealer handling spiny dogfish may sit inside the federal carve-out and still run afoul of a stricter rule in a particular state. Enforcement falls to NOAA Fisheries, which applies the same civil penalty process used for other federal fisheries violations.

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California bars the sale of foie gras produced by force-feeding a bird to enlarge its liver. The state law was signed in 2004 and took effect on July 1, 2012. It survived nearly a decade of litigation, ending when the Supreme Court declined a final appeal in January 2019.

The statute targets the production method rather than the product category. Conventional foie gras comes from ducks or geese fattened through gavage, a process in which feed is delivered through a tube inserted into the bird's throat during its final weeks. California prohibits force-feeding inside the state and also bars the sale of any product made that way. That second clause covers nearly the entire commercial supply, because gavage remains standard among producers in France, Hungary and Canada.

Restaurant groups and producers fought the measure in federal court for years. Their main argument was that the federal Poultry Products Inspection Act overrides state rules governing poultry products. A district court agreed in 2015, leaving the sales ban unenforceable for roughly two years. The Ninth Circuit reversed that ruling in 2017, and enforcement resumed after the Supreme Court refused to take the case.

Scope is where this ban is most often misstated. It is a California statute, so foie gras remains legal to sell across most of the country, including every state bordering California. Production also continues on a small number of American farms outside California. New York City passed its own foie gras restriction in 2019, which has since run into separate legal and administrative challenges.

Later rulings dealt with whether California residents may buy foie gras from out-of-state sellers for personal consumption, a narrower question than the in-state sales ban. The practical effect is a product that can be shipped, cooked and eaten freely a few hundred miles east, while a San Francisco restaurant cannot put it on a check. Some chefs have tried workarounds, such as serving it free alongside a paid dish, and state regulators have treated certain arrangements as attempts to evade the law.

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Consumer fireworks are controlled state by state in the U.S., not by one national ban, and Massachusetts goes furthest: it prohibits the sale, possession, and use of all consumer fireworks, including sparklers, for private individuals. Residents who want a display have to attend a licensed professional show.

New Jersey sits one step behind. A 2017 revision to state law made hand-held sparklers and ground-based novelty items such as snakes and smoke devices legal to buy, while firecrackers, bottle rockets, and aerial shells stayed off limits to ordinary buyers. Illinois draws a comparable line, allowing sparklers and a narrow set of smoke items while barring most of what people picture as backyard fireworks.

States that do permit consumer fireworks usually regulate by device type rather than banning the category outright. Ground fountains and cones can be legal in the same state where anything that lifts off or produces a loud report is not. Many states add calendar limits, permitting discharge only in the days around specific holidays, and most let counties and towns impose stricter rules, including temporary bans during drought.

A federal layer sits underneath all of it. The Consumer Product Safety Commission regulates consumer fireworks under the Federal Hazardous Substances Act, limiting a consumer firecracker to 50 milligrams of pyrotechnic composition and keeping devices such as M-80s and cherry bombs off the general market entirely. Those limits hold in every state, including the ones with the loosest local rules, so even a firecracker bought legally in Wyoming is a far smaller charge than the professional-grade products sold under similar names.

The practical consequence falls on people who cross state lines. A box bought legally at a roadside stand in New Hampshire becomes contraband once it enters Massachusetts, and possession alone can lead to confiscation. Retailers clustered near state borders sell heavily to out-of-state customers who cannot legally carry the product home, which is the recurring enforcement problem in this corner of U.S. law: the purchase is lawful where it happens, and the return trip is not.

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Single-use plastic shopping bags are banned statewide in California, New York, New Jersey and several other states, but no federal law restricts them anywhere in the country. Legality depends on the state, and in some places the county or city, where a shopper is standing at the register.

California approved the first statewide ban through Proposition 67, a 2016 ballot measure that upheld legislation barring large retailers from handing out thin single-use plastic bags at checkout. Stores could still sell a paper bag or a thicker plastic bag marketed as reusable for a small fee. That carve-out drew criticism for years, because the heavier bags were rarely reused and counted as plastic waste all the same. California passed a follow-up law in 2024 to close the loophole and eliminate the thicker bag option at grocery checkouts.

New York's statewide ban took effect in 2020 after a delay tied to litigation over the rules. New Jersey went furthest, prohibiting both single-use plastic and paper carryout bags at grocery stores above a certain size starting in 2022, which pushed shoppers toward reusable totes rather than a swap from one disposable material to another.

Other states have moved in the opposite direction, passing preemption laws that block their own cities and counties from adopting bag bans. A municipality can favor the policy and still be legally barred from enacting it, which is why the national map splits between jurisdictions tightening the rules and jurisdictions prohibiting local action.

The justification for these laws is environmental rather than medical. Thin plastic film is difficult to recycle through conventional curbside systems, jams sorting equipment at processing facilities, and persists in waterways and landfills. Enforcement usually falls on retailers, not customers, through fines for stores that keep distributing banned bags. Many jurisdictions pair the ban with a mandatory per-bag charge on whatever alternative is offered, treating the fee as the behavioral lever and the ban as the backstop.

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Commercial trade in African elephant ivory is almost entirely prohibited in the U.S. under Endangered Species Act regulations finalized in 2016. Several states, among them New York, California and New Jersey, have passed their own bans that reach further than the federal rule does.

The federal regulation blocks most interstate and international commercial sale of African elephant ivory, leaving only narrow carve-outs. Antiques can qualify if the owner documents that the item is more than 100 years old and meets the other conditions set out in the law. A separate exception covers manufactured goods in which ivory is a small, incidental component rather than the main material.

The burden of proof sits with the seller. Paperwork reaching back a century is hard to produce, so the exceptions stay narrow in practice as well as on paper.

The 2016 rule followed years of pressure over elephant poaching across Africa. It moved U.S. domestic policy closer to the international framework set by CITES, the treaty governing cross-border trade in endangered species.

States that enacted their own bans aimed at the weak point in the federal structure. Because documented antique ivory can still be sold legally under federal law, conservation groups raised concern that newly carved pieces were being passed off as old. New York's statute tightens the antique allowance considerably, so an object a seller could lawfully offer under federal rules may still be illegal to sell inside the state.

The practical consequence falls on people who inherit ivory rather than on people who trade in it. Older piano keys, carved figurines, billiard balls, jewelry and antique furniture inlays all turn up in estates. Owning them is generally not the problem. Selling them is.

Anyone considering a sale has to clear two separate hurdles: the federal exception, and whatever the state where the transaction happens requires. The two do not line up neatly. An auction house in one state may accept a piece that a dealer two states away cannot legally handle.

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Bulk pure caffeine powder sold as a dietary supplement has been targeted by FDA enforcement because the gap between an ordinary dose and a lethal one is too small to measure with household tools. The agency has issued warning letters to distributors and acted against bulk sales of highly concentrated caffeine in both powder and liquid form.

The arithmetic explains the concern. A single teaspoon of pure caffeine powder can hold roughly the caffeine equivalent of dozens of cups of coffee. A safe serving is a fraction of a gram, an amount no kitchen measuring spoon can portion out reliably. Anyone mixing a drink from a bag of powder has almost no way to avoid a severe overdose. Doing it safely requires a scale accurate to the milligram, which few households own.

The FDA's position distinguishes format from ingredient. Caffeine itself remains legal and sold everywhere. Coffee, tea, soda, energy drinks, caffeine tablets and pre-workout powders packaged in fixed, pre-measured servings are all permitted. What the agency has treated as unlawful is the sale of highly concentrated caffeine straight to consumers in bulk, where the dosing decision falls entirely on the buyer.

Dietary supplements sit in an unusual regulatory position that makes this situation possible. Under the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, supplements need no FDA approval before reaching the market. The agency generally steps in after a product is already for sale, using warning letters, seizures and import alerts rather than reviewing formulas in advance.

That structure means enforcement here has advanced company by company instead of through one sweeping prohibition. No single statute lists banned caffeine products by name. What exists instead is a body of agency guidance and enforcement actions holding that bulk concentrated caffeine marketed to consumers is adulterated and cannot legally be sold. The same compound, packed into a capsule with a stated milligram count, stays on the shelf.

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Partially hydrogenated oils were removed from the U.S. food supply by FDA order effective June 2018. These industrial fats supplied most of the artificial trans fat in American processed food. A compliance window stretched into 2020 for products already on the market. The ban is federal and covers the entire ingredient category nationwide.

Hydrogenation turns liquid vegetable oil into a semi-solid fat by adding hydrogen to its molecular structure. Stopping the reaction partway yields a fat that holds its shape at room temperature, resists going rancid and costs less than butter. It also gave baked goods a longer shelf life, which mattered for products shipped across the country. Manufacturers leaned on it through the 20th century for margarine, shortening, packaged cookies and crackers, microwave popcorn, frozen pizza crusts and commercial frying oil.

Partial hydrogenation creates trans fatty acids as a byproduct. Those raise LDL cholesterol while lowering HDL cholesterol — a combination tied to heart disease risk. The FDA issued a final determination in 2015 that partially hydrogenated oils no longer met the generally recognized as safe standard. That legal category lets an ingredient be used without formal pre-market approval. Losing it meant any food containing the oils counted as adulterated under federal law unless the manufacturer obtained specific FDA authorization for that use.

Much of the industry had already moved on. A labeling rule that took effect on Jan. 1, 2006 forced trans fat content onto the nutrition facts panel, and companies reformulated rather than print a number shoppers had learned to avoid. Palm oil, fully hydrogenated oil blended with liquid oil, and high-oleic sunflower and soybean oils absorbed most of the replacement demand.

Trans fat did not vanish from American food. Small amounts occur naturally in beef, lamb and dairy products, formed by bacteria in the stomachs of ruminant animals. The FDA order does not reach those. The rulemaking addressed the industrially produced form rather than the chemical class as a whole, and it applies in every state because it rests on federal food-additive authority.

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The FDA banned Red Dye No. 3 from food, dietary supplements, and ingested drugs in January 2025, with compliance deadlines of January 2027 for food and January 2028 for ingested drugs. The decision followed findings that the dye caused cancer in laboratory rats, and it applies nationwide.

The color additive, listed as FD&C Red No. 3 and also known as erythrosine, produces a bright cherry-red shade that holds up in acidic products and under heat. It has colored maraschino cherries, candy, frosting, fruit cocktail, and some chewable medications and supplements.

A 35-year gap sits at the center of the ban. The FDA removed Red No. 3 from cosmetics and externally applied drugs in 1990 after the same rodent studies, yet the dye stayed legal in food throughout the period that followed. A chemical the agency had declared unfit for lipstick remained lawful in candy for three and a half decades.

The legal mechanism behind the 2025 action is the Delaney Clause, a provision added to federal food law in 1958. It bars approval of any food additive found to induce cancer in humans or animals. The clause leaves no room to weigh dose or exposure level once that finding exists. The ban was less a new scientific judgment than the closing of a long-pending regulatory question. A 2022 petition from consumer advocacy organizations pushed the matter back onto the agency's agenda.

The FDA has said the mechanism that produced tumors in male rats does not operate in humans at the exposure levels involved. The Delaney Clause does not allow that distinction to decide the outcome.

Products containing Red No. 3 remain legal to sell during the compliance window. Manufacturers are moving toward alternatives such as Red No. 40 and plant-derived colorings from beets and carrots. California passed its own state ban in October 2023, effective in 2027, before the federal rule arrived.

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Cheese made from unpasteurized milk and aged fewer than 60 days cannot legally be shipped or sold across state lines in the U.S. The FDA rule governs interstate commerce specifically, which is why the same wheel can be legal at a farm stand and illegal once it is packed for shipment to another state.

The reasoning rests on what happens inside a cheese as it matures. Raw milk can carry listeria, salmonella, or E. coli, pathogens that pasteurization is designed to destroy before cheesemaking begins. Skipping that step leaves bacterial control to the cheese itself — the acidity built up during fermentation, the salt worked into the curd, and the moisture lost gradually over weeks. Two months is the point at which those combined conditions were judged to bring risk down to an acceptable level.

Because the FDA's authority here runs through interstate commerce, states keep control over what happens inside their own borders. Several permit the sale of young raw milk cheese as long as it never leaves the state, so a creamery can sell a soft, two-week-old raw milk round at a farmers market near home without violating anything. Send that same round to a customer one state away and it becomes a federal matter.

The divide shapes who can scale and who cannot. A producer hoping to reach national retailers has two realistic paths: age everything past the 60-day mark, or switch to pasteurized milk. Both change the finished cheese, and both push small operations toward firmer, longer-aged styles rather than fresh ones. Anything moving through a national distributor crosses a state line at some point, so the rule caps how far a young raw milk cheese can travel from where it was made.

Imports run into the same wall. Many European soft cheeses are made from raw milk and sold at well under two months old in their home markets, and those versions cannot clear U.S. customs. What reaches American shelves under the same name is frequently a pasteurized version made for export, which is why a given French cheese can differ depending on which side of the Atlantic it was bought.

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Salvia divinorum carries no federal scheduling in the U.S., yet it is a controlled substance under the laws of several states, among them Louisiana and Delaware. Possession that is entirely lawful on one side of a state line can bring a criminal charge on the other.

The plant belongs to the mint family and is native to the Sierra Mazateca region of Oaxaca, Mexico, where Mazatec healers have long used the leaves in divination and healing ceremonies. Its potency comes from salvinorin A, a compound that acts on the kappa-opioid receptor rather than the serotonin pathways most classic hallucinogens target. Smoked, the effects arrive within seconds and typically fade within about 15 minutes — a far shorter window than psilocybin or LSD produce.

Louisiana acted first, passing a 2005 law that criminalized a long list of hallucinogenic plants and swept salvia in with them. Delaware followed in 2006 with a statute known as Brett's Law, named for a teenager whose family linked his death to the substance, placing salvia among the state's most tightly controlled drugs. Other legislatures moved through the late 2000s, as footage of users circulated online and the leaves and extracts sold openly through websites and head shops.

Those statehouses did not settle on one approach. Some grouped salvia with scheduled hallucinogens. Some wrote a standalone category for the plant and its extracts. Others declined to ban it and instead barred sales to minors, the route California took in 2008. A number of states leave it unregulated entirely.

The DEA lists salvia divinorum as a drug of concern, a label that signals monitoring and possible future action without attaching the penalties that come with placement on the Controlled Substances Act schedules. That distance between federal attention and federal prohibition is what leaves the legal map uneven, and why the answer to whether salvia is legal depends almost entirely on which state is asking.

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Aerosol cans propelled by chlorofluorocarbons have been illegal to manufacture and sell in the U.S. since 1978, when the FDA, the EPA and the Consumer Product Safety Commission jointly barred CFCs as propellants in nonessential products. The nationwide rule covered ordinary goods such as hairspray, deodorant and household cleaners.

CFCs became the propellant of choice after World War II because they were nonflammable, chemically inert and cheap to produce, which made them well suited to pushing liquid out of a pressurized can in an even mist. Their stability turned out to be the problem. Chemists Mario Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland published research in 1974 showing that CFC molecules last long enough to reach the stratosphere, where ultraviolet light breaks them apart and frees chlorine atoms that destroy ozone. The two shared the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for that work, along with Paul Crutzen.

U.S. regulators moved on the finding within four years, ahead of most of the world. The 1978 rule singled out nonessential uses, leaving carve-outs where no workable substitute existed yet — among them metered-dose asthma inhalers, which kept CFC propellant for years before later rules phased them out.

Manufacturers switched to hydrocarbon propellants such as propane, butane and isobutane, along with compressed gases like nitrogen, and those remain standard in spray cans sold today. The flammability warnings printed on modern aerosol labels follow directly from that substitution.

The American ban arrived nearly a decade before the Montreal Protocol. The 1987 treaty extended CFC phaseouts worldwide and reached far more industries — refrigeration, air conditioning and foam insulation, where the chemicals were used in much larger volumes than in spray cans. Production for those uses wound down across developed countries through the 1990s.

The aerosol ban stands apart from most consumer product restrictions in what prompted it. Regulators pulled a household item off the market not because the contents could injure the person holding the can, but because of the cumulative damage the propellant caused to the atmosphere after it was released.