I own several sets of buckyballs and did quite a bit of research on the issue when it was being litigated. I have no opinions on the CPUC's later personal litig

I own several sets of buckyballs and did quite a bit of research on the issue when it was being litigated. I have no opinions on the CPUC's later personal litigations but I would like to note that the Buckyball corporation did a wonderful job fanning unfair populist outrage against the CPUC and that the story is significantly more complicated. I have no dog in this fight but in the interest of fairness, here are points presented from the other side: * The risk from buckyballs is highly non-obvious and hard to intuit. I, personally, did not perceive the risk until I read about it. Most items should not be swallowed because they're a choking hazard, they have sharp edges or they contain toxic chemicals. Buckballs are small spheres of stainless steel which present none of those risks. Instead, the risk is if two balls attract each other through layers of your intestine, eventually causing gangrene and sepsis. That's not something I had ever thought about when playing with them. * The severity of harm was far greater than other swallowing hazards. Treatment for people who improperly swallowed buckyballs involved major surgery and the removal of sections of their intestines. This is orders of magnitudes more severe than most swallowing related injuries, something which also does not fit most people's naive threat models. * Injury happens days after the event, making cause and effect hard to pin down. The usual response to a child swallowing something improper is to monitor closely for 6 - 24 hours and only seek medical attention if something untoward is happening. Because buckyball injuries occur days after the event, it's hard to pin a stomachache problem on Thursday with swallowing on Monday and treat it with the severity it deserves. * The design of the toy makes it intrinsically impossible to keep the warnings intact with use. It doesn't matter how dire the warnings may be on an attached sheet of paper because the toy could be sold, given away or played with second hand and there was no way to guarantee transmission that information to the 2nd party. With larger toys, the CPUC could have mandated that warnings be injection moulded into the plastic for example but there was no such recourse with buckyballs. * There's a finite number of compelling uses of buckyballs and one of them was to make fake studs by attaching them together through a thin fold of skin. On the face, there are only 4 places where this is possible: The earlobe, the nasal cavity, the lip fold and the tongue. 3 of the 4 places allow for a swallowing hazard and magnets are very easy to make fall apart with just the wrong nudge. This greatly increased the likelihood that this toy would be swallowed compared to similar toys. * Swallowing a single buckyball is harmless, potentially giving people a false sense of security after accidentally swallowing one and having nothing bad happen. This would make them subsequently less careful in the future. I'm pretty libertarian but I can certainly see the CPUC's rationale in banning these things. Yes, they're incredibly fun to play with and I still tinker with them to this day but the safety risks shouldn't be trivialized either.