Pure Food and Drug Act

Pure Food And Drug Act

The Pure Food and Drugs Act of June 30, 1906, was a key piece of Progressive Era legislation, signed by President Theodore Roosevelt on the same day as the Meat Inspection Act. Enforcement of the Pure Food and Drugs (plural on drugS) was assigned to the Bureau of Chemistry in the U.S. Department of Agriculture which was renamed the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1930. The Meat Inspection Act was assigned to what is now known as the Food Safety and Inspection Service that remains in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The first federal law regulating foods and drugs, the 1906 Act's reach was limited to foods and drugs moving in interstate commerce. Although the law drew upon many precedents, provisions, and legal experiments pioneered in individual states, the federal law defined "misbranding" and "adulteration" for the first time and prescribed penalties for each. The law recognized the U.S. Pharmacopeia and the National Formulary as standards authorities for drugs, but made no similar provision for federal food standards. The law was principally a "truth in labeling" law designed to raise standards in the food and drug industries and protect the reputations and pocketbooks of honest businessmen. Under the law, drug labels, for example, had to list any of 10 iingredients that were deemed "dangerous" on the product label if they were present and could not list them if they were not present. Alcohol, morphine and opium, and cannabis were all included on the list of "dangerous" drugs. The law also established a federal cadre of food and drug inspectors that one Southern opponent of the legislation criticized as "a Trojan horse with a bellyful of inspectors." Penalties under the law were modest, but an under-appreciated provision of the Act proved more powerful than monetary penalties. Goods found in violation of the law were subject to seizure and destruction at the expense of the manufacturer. That, combined with a legal requirement that all convictions be published (Notices of Judgment), proved to be important tools in the enforcement of the statute and had a deterrent effect upon would-be violators. Deficiencies in this original statute, which had become noticeable by the 1920s, led to the replacement of the 1906 statute with the federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which, was enacted in 1938 and signed by President Franklin Roosevelt.

It took 27 years to pass the 1906 statute, during which time the public was made aware of many problems with foods and drugs in the U.S. Muckraking journalists such as Samuel Hopkins Adams targeted the patent medicine industry with its high-alcoholic content patent medicines, soothing syrups for infants with opium derivatives, and "red clauses" in newspaper contracts providing that patent medicine ads (upon which most newspapers of the time were dependent) would be withdrawn if the paper expressed support for food and drug regulatory legislation. The Chief Chemist of the Bureau of Chemistry, Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, captured the country's attention with his hygienic table studies, which began with a modest Congressional appropriation in 1902. The goal of the table trial was to study the human effects of common preservatives used in foods during a period of rapid changes in the food supply brought about by the need to feed cities and support an industrializing nation increasingly dependent on immigrant labor. Wiley recruited young men to eat all their meals at a common table as he added increased "doses" of preservatives including borax, benzoate, formaldehyde, sulfites, and salicylates. The table trials captured the nation's fancy and were soon dubbed "The Poison Squad" by newspapers covering the story. The men sooned adopted the motto "Only the Brave dare eat the fare" and at times the publicity given to the trials became a burden. Though many results of the trial came to be in dispute, there was no doubt that formaldehyde was dangerous and it disappeared quickly as a preservative. Wiley himself felt that he had found adverse effects from large doses of each of the preservatives and the public seemed to agree with Wiley. In many cases, most particularly with catsups and other condiments, the use of preservatives was often used to disguise insanitary production practices. Although the law itself did not proscribe the use of some of these preservatives, consumers increasingly turned away from many products with known preservatives.

1906 statute regulated food and drugs moving in interstate commerce is a United States federal law that cts and forbade the manufacture, sale, or transportation of poisonous patent medicines. The Act arose due to public education and exposés from Muckrakers such as Upton Sinclair and Samuel Hopkins Adams, social activist Florence Kelley, researcher Harvey W. Wiley, and President Theodore Roosevelt.