Sportbike Addicts | Two Wheels... Our Drug of Choice - Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act

On February 10, 2009, a new law called the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act went into effect. This law was created by Congress last August as a knee-jerk reaction to hazardous toys being imported from China (remember the Fisher-Price toy recalls). It bans all products sold for use by children which contain above certain levels of lead and phthalates. In the act, children is defined as anyone 12 or under, and the law is very broad in that it exempts no products from its purview.

What does this mean for motorcycles?

All minibikes and pitbikes fall under this act, as well as ATV's sold for youths. As of today, all the major motorcycle and ATV manufacturers have instructed their dealers to remove all bikes and ATV's used by children from inventory and to cease advertising, marketing, selling, possibly servicing these products. The lead contained in these bikes is not in the paint; it's in the metal used for certain parts in the engines and electrical parts. Most dealers have also been instructed to stop selling parts and accessories for the bikes as well.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission, CPSC, which is the commission charged with enforcing this act has been asked by the motorcycle industry to grant a waiver to prevent the end of the motorcycle industry, but they are dragging their feet. As a result, minibikes and pitbikes became illegal today.

What can you do about this?

We are sending this email to ask you to band together as the motorcycle community to tell the bureaucrats in Washington, DC that they need to act and act now to stop this from hurting the motorcycle industry any more.

116th District Missouri Representative Tom Self, father of two kids who race bikes, has organized a campaign to contact our legislators and the CPSC to demand that they act immediately to grant the waiver to the motorcycle industry. This campaign relies upon everyone who is involved in any way with motorcycles and racing to get involved and send a message. That's not just one representative of the family, but Mom, Dad, sister, brother...everyone! To make this easy, Representative Self has created a website with a form which can be used to generate letters to all the involved officials. Every member of your family who is a citizen of the US must be encouraged to send in this letter. Contact everyone you know who is involved in racing and get them to send a message. It is important that Washington DC be totally swamped with emails and phone calls about this, and it must happen right now!

The website is http://www.tomself.com and it's easy to do.

The AMA also has a link which will contact your local representative http://capwiz.com/amacycle/issues/al...ertid=12661926