Pure Food and Drug Act

Pure Food and Drug Act, in U.S. history, legislation passed in 1906 to ensure the sanitary preparation of consumable goods. The Pure Food and Drug Act required accurate ingredient labeling and prohibited the sale of adulterated and misbranded food and drugs in interstate commerce. As the first federal regulations aimed to safeguard the health and well-being of American consumers, the act laid the foundation for the first consumer protection agency in the United States, the Food and Drug Administration, established in 1927.

Although Congress had investigated adulterated medicines in the 1840s, little was done to regulate their manufacture and sale. American editor Edward Bok was one of the early figures in the fight against quack cures and impure drugs. His announcement in 1892 that he would accept no more patent medicine advertising in the Ladies’ Home Journal opened the way for a crusade that enlisted other editors to do likewise. However, it was largely the investigative journalists of the era, known as “muckrakers,” who exposed the squalid conditions of drug- and food-processing industries and began to foment legislative change. One such muckraker was Samuel Hopkins Adams, who contributed a series of articles to Collier’s, the National Weekly exposing quack patent medicines in 1905. This was followed by his work The Great American Fraud (1906), which further uncovered the extent of corruption in patent medicines, including fake testimonials, dangerous and addictive quack cures, and drug impurities. These investigative efforts were supported by Harvey W. Wiley, a passionate advocate for public health and federal responsibility. Known as the “Crusading Chemist,” he became the chief chemist of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Chemistry and expanded the bureau’s food adulteration studies.

The spread of information about dishonest drug manufacture and marketing was accompanied by a growing horror of similar duplicity in food manufacture and sales. Especially effective at generating public outrage on this front was Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle (published serially in 1905). The most famous, influential, and enduring of the muckraking novels, The Jungle was an exposé of Chicago stockyards and highlighted dangerous labour practices, the cruel treatment of slaughterhouse animals, unsanitary food-processing conditions, and the resultant appalling food quality. In the decades prior to the book’s release, nearly 100 bills had been created to regulate food and drugs, and all had languished before Congress. However, compelled to action by the public’s reaction to the novel, U.S. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt pushed Congress to pass both the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act in 1906. In a speech to the U.S. House of Representatives on June 21, 1906, Illinois Rep. James Mann highlighted other shocking examples of food contamination. He stated:

I have here…a number of adulterated articles. Here is a bottle of cherries, originally picked green, in order that they might be firm, with the green color all taken out with acid until they were perfectly white, and then colored with an aniline dye which is poisonous in any quantity.

The act was passed by Congress on June 30 and immediately signed into law by Roosevelt. The Bureau of Chemistry, headed by Wiley, was initially tasked with its enforcement. In 1907 the secretary of agriculture James Wilson created a Board of Food and Drug Inspection to clarify agency policy in enforcing the law.

The Pure Food and Drug Act established that food and drug labels could not be misleading or false. As a result, it eliminated many of the widely advertised quack cures for cancer, tuberculosis, and other serious diseases; thereafter some of the same preparations were sold as cures for coughs, colds, pains and aches, and minor complaints. Food and medicine labels needed to clearly state all ingredients, including any variations, and were required to disclose the presence and amount of 11 dangerous substances, including alcohol, heroin, morphine, caffeine, opium, cocaine, and cannabis. Labels were required to carry warnings as to hazards and, in some instances, references to diseases that would not be helped by the preparation. The act prohibited any ingredients that were intended to serve as a substitute for food, that posed a health hazard (including decomposed or dirty substances), or that were included to conceal damage. The interstate transport of unlawful food and drugs was prohibited, and violators could face the seizure of their products and prosecution.