Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906

Spoiled milk was dosed with formaldehyde to make it taste tolerable, what was sold as ground coffee was probably chicory, and the yellow coating on children's sweets often contained arsenic. That is how Michael Bazaco of the FDA, reviewing Deborah Blum's history of the period for the CDC journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, sums up what Americans were eating in the late 1800s.

Harvey Washington Wiley, who led the Bureau of Chemistry in the US Department of Agriculture, spent years pressing Congress for federal control. He had allies: Alice Lakey of the National Consumers League, colleagues in the American Medical Association and even the food manufacturer H.J. Heinz. The final push came from a novel. According to the FDA's own history, the conditions in the meatpacking industry that Upton Sinclair described in The Jungle were the last precipitating force.

Theodore Roosevelt signed the Food and Drugs Act on 30 June 1906. It prohibited the interstate transport of unlawful food and drugs, under penalty of seizure. Drug labels had to show the presence and amount of eleven dangerous ingredients, among them alcohol, heroin and cocaine, and drugs had to meet the standards of the United States Pharmacopoeia and the National Formulary or state plainly how they differed. The Bureau of Chemistry was charged with enforcing the law.

Enforcement proved hard. Wiley faced political opposition, presidents with other priorities and large food and chemical companies looking for ways around the law. In 1911 the Supreme Court ruled that the act did not, as the government had argued, apply to false therapeutic claims. An amendment in 1912, the year Wiley resigned, tried to repair the wording. The 1906 law stayed in force until Congress replaced it with the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act in 1938.