March 19, 2007 8:28AM # The Negative Side-Effects of Government Safety Rules By [Daniel J. Mitchell](https://www.cato.org/people/daniel-mitchell) --- SHARE Politicians and bureaucrats frequently impose rules and regulations to protect us from the risks of life. But even if one assumes that all this red tape is well-meaning, the consequences often are negative. The costs to the economy often are the most obvious downside of regulation, but sometimes safety regulations actually make us less safe. John Stossel’s Town​hall​.com column [notes](http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/JohnStossel/2007/03/14/hazardous_safety_regulation) that safety caps on drugs actually have increased the number of children who get poisoned: > A joint study by the Brookings Institution and American Enterprise Institute found that government regulations that are supposed to save lives actually end up killing more people. Why? Because safety laws almost always have unintended *bad* consequences. …In 1972, the FDA passed a law requiring child safety caps on many medications. It was supposed to keep kids from being poisoned by drugs like aspirin. But there is an unexpected side effect. Because safety caps are hard to get off, some people — particularly older people — leave them off, and some parents, feeling safer with the cap, leave the aspirin where kids can reach it. A study of this “lulling effect” concluded that an additional 3,000 children have been poisoned by aspirin *because* of the regulation. ##### Related Tags [General](https://www.cato.org/general), [Government and Politics](https://www.cato.org/government-politics), [Regulation](https://www.cato.org/regulatory-studies) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).