# Pure Food and Drug Act Signed **June 30, 1906**, the Pure Food and Drug Act prohibited interstate commerce in adulterated or misbranded food and drugs. It is the founding statute of American consumer-protection regulation and the origin of what became the **[[FDA]]**. It was signed the same day as the Federal Meat Inspection Act, and both were products of the same political moment. ## How it passed The proximate cause was publicity rather than legislative deliberation. Upton Sinclair's *The Jungle* (1906) was written as an argument for socialism and landed instead as an exposé of meatpacking sanitation — Sinclair's own summary was that he had aimed at the public's heart and by accident hit its stomach. Public revulsion, combined with the long chemical-adulteration campaign run by Agriculture Department chemist **Harvey Washington Wiley**, produced the votes. The 1906 Act was weaker than its reputation. It required accurate labeling and prohibited adulteration, but did **not** require that a drug be shown safe or effective before sale. That gap closed only in 1938, after the Elixir Sulfanilamide disaster killed more than a hundred people, when the **Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act** superseded it and introduced premarket safety review. ## Why it matters for the KB **1. It is the origin point of the regulatory state the vault documents being dismantled.** Arguments about the administrative state's legitimacy — nondelegation, *Chevron* and its overruling in *Loper Bright*, the major-questions doctrine — are arguments about the machinery that starts here. The 1906 Act is where Congress first delegated to executive-branch experts the power to determine what may be sold, and the delegation model has been contested ever since. **2. The passage pattern recurs and it is not flattering.** Regulation arrived after a mass-market book generated public disgust, and the stronger version arrived only after mass casualties. That is the standard American sequence — **catastrophe, then rule** — and it is the counter-argument to the claim that regulatory requirements are preemptive overreach. Most were written after the bodies. **3. Labeling as the minimum viable regulation.** The Act's core requirement was disclosure rather than prohibition, which remains the least-contested form of regulation and the first fallback whenever substantive standards are politically unreachable. The disclosure-versus-prohibition choice runs through the vault's material on tobacco, firearms, campaign finance, and food policy. ## See Also - [[FDA]] — the agency descended from this Act - [[Progressive Era]] · [[US Antitrust and Monopoly Timeline]] - [[Theodore Roosevelt]] — signed it