The Food and Drug Administration Explained

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Why does the United States have an FDA? Mr. Beat goes through the agency's history, beginning with the Meat Inspection Act and Food and Drug Act of 1906.

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By the 1890s, public perception of drugs in the United States had shifted. Not only did many Americans now want to ban alcohol, they wanted to ban OR regulate ALL DRUGS. Especially highly addictive drugs, like heroin and cocaine.

By that time, doctors had increasingly become more strict about prescribing such drugs to treat patients, but the fact remained that you could still buy a lot of that stuff over the counter. Oh, and most of that stuff didn’t disclose exactly what was in it. Like Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup. Although we’ll never know the exact number, thousands of parents likely accidentally killed their children when they gave them too much Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup. The American Medical Association would later call Winslow’s a “baby killer.”

Many Americans called for the federal government to do something about these dangerous, unlabelled over the counter patent medicines. Before this time, the federal government rarely got involved, though, and let state and local governments handle it. When it did get involved, it was usually the Department of Agriculture looking at the safety of agricultural products.

Americans were also increasingly getting worried about what was in the food they ate that was packaged and sold in markets. After the Industrial Revolution, food production became a worldwide industry. For the first time, food could be packaged in a way that it lasted longer and didn’t spoil so quickly. Well, some food manufacturers might add some extra spices or additives to canned food to uh...hide the bad taste of expired food. Now, since 1879, nearly 100 bills had been introduced in Congress to regulate food and drugs. But they all failed.

But one man was perhaps more determined than any other to change that. Who was that? Why... a chemist named Harvey Washington Wiley. As leader of the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Chemistry, he spent years trying to convince the United States Congress, while simultaneously fighting off the food lobbyists, to pass a law to do this.

It wasn’t just Wiley and his Poison Squad. There were all the muckrakers, or reform-minded journalists of the Progressive Era who called out unsanitary conditions in factories.. There was also this little book called The Jungle.

#apush #ushistory #fda