Canada banned asbestos brakes this year. Brakes are still exempted under US asbestos bans. Manufacturers and repair shops avoid them for obvious reasons, but they're not illegal.

https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-2006-05-04-06050400...

https://canada.autonews.com/article/20180107/CANADA/18010983...

they were. But they used asbestos in a lot of things back in the day. I worked in a building with asbestos in the floor tiles. When they did constructions that involved removing the tiles, it became a big deal.

Asbestos isn't that harmful, until it goes airborne. My understanding from research (I worked expanding a landfill that took asbestos at one point). is that the particles are too small to be caught by our bodies defenses and when it ends up in your lungs its cancerous. Asbestos in brakes seems like a bad idea.

see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesothelioma

There's another thread that claims that was 50 years ago.

I believe a lot of the stopping power comes from ceramic cinders in the pads. Those showed up in high end bicycle brake pads about 25 years ago, and I think they were old news in high performance cars before that. I have a fuzzy recollection that they trickled down into mid-tier vehicles not long after that. 2000-ish?

Yes. Napa and other brake manufacturers are called into lots of mesothelioma trials. Brake pad exposure is usually smaller contributors to such cases. That is, the victim often had much worse exposure other places, but they still look at how much brake pad exposure the person had too.