This video has not been evaluated by the FDA. This video is not intended to diagnose,
treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
I’m Mr. Beat It used to be that you
could walk into any drugstore and buy any drug you wanted without a prescription from a doctor.
Life during the 1800s was difficult by today’s standards, and many around the world
regularly used drugs to feel better.
Gee, that actually kind of sounds like today.
But no, the 1800s were different, man. Take the United States. We’re gonna focus on that country
in this video. Even when several states within the country were making it increasingly difficult to
buy alcohol, everything else? Meh, pretty easy to get. Take Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup,
a mix of ammonia, morphine and alcohol parents used to give to their babies to get them to calm
down. Here’s an ad for it. It soothes the child. It softens the gums. It allays all
pain.It cures wind colic. It is the best remedy for diarrhea. Ok then.
Or how about some Ayer’s Cherry Pectoral? A mix of opium and alcohol, which was
very popular as a supposed cure for coughs, colds, asthma, bronchitis, croup,
whooping cough, and consumption, which today we call tuberculosis. Yeah, I don’t know about that.
Then there’s Cocaine Toothache Drops. Just 15 cents for an instantaneous cure!
Apparently cocaine used to be a fairly common local anesthetic for
patients who had their teeth removed. Most famously, Coca-Cola used to have
cocaine in it. “Coca” literally referred to coca leaves. Cola referred to the kola nut.
Invented by a dude named in 1885, his original recipe contained cocaine in the form of an extract
of the coca leaf. The kola nut was the part that contained the caffeine.
That’s right. The two key ingredients of Coca-Cola were caffeine and cocaine.
So the original Coca-Cola must have REALLY been a boost to your day!
And yes, Pemberton promoted the drink as a sort of medicine to cure
headaches and exhaustion. Well actually, Coca-Cola was what we call a patent medicine.
These patent medicines, like Coca Cola or the ever-popular Snake Oil, were one of the reasons
the FDA became a thing. And if you want to learn more about them, I’ve got a snake
oil salesman for you. Ok, he’s not a snake oil salesman. He’s an educator. My friend
Patrick Kelly has just released a video about how these medicines transformed medicine and
the state of advertising in the US., over on his medical history channel. Check it out
when you’re done watching this video. It’s the best thing since snake oil.
But this video is about the FDA, or Food and Drug Administration. Beginning in 1904,
the Coca-Cola Company was able to dramatically reduce the amount of cocaine that was in its drink
by using the old coca leaves that were leftover after the cocaine was already extracted. By 1929,
it found a way to remove all trace amounts of cocaine in Coca-Cola.
Not that they wanted too necessarily, but because they HAD to because of the...you guessed it…FDA.
But let’s go back to the 1800s. 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.
Oh yeah, I should probably also mention food.
We’ve been talking about drugs so much that I’m starting to get hungry now.
Yeah 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.
In 1902, Congress agreed to give Wiley $5,000 to slowly poison 12 young men.
You thought I was joking. No, I’m not joking. There’s no punchline.
More precisely, they gave him $5,000 to study the effects of adding borax and other potential
poisons to the food and drinks of these young men, beginning at low doses and then increasing the
doses until one or more of the men got sick. Nicknamed by the media “the Poison Squad,”
these men volunteered knowing the consequences and apparently knew what they were getting themselves
into, agreeing not to sue the government if they got really sick. Why did they do it? Well,
in addition to a bunch of free food, they seemed to do it mostly as an act of
public service. As predicted, many of the men got really sick. The studies went on with a rotating
cast of men for the next five years, and a report about it leaked, FREAKING PEOPLE OUT.
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.
The Jungle was a novel written by a dude named Upton Sinclair, first published in 1905
in sections of a socialist newspaper called Appeal to Reason. Sinclair wrote the book
after spending seven weeks secretly working in meatpacking plants of the Chicago stockyards.
He wanted to show the world the harsh working conditions that American immigrants
experienced in these meatpacking plants. The main purpose of the book was to advance worker rights
and socialism. The book was a big hit, but to Sinclair’s surprise, what caught the public’s
attention wasn’t the exploited workers, but all the nasty meat. People got mad about the health
violations and unsanitary practices in the meatpacking industry instead! Sinclair later
famously said about this, "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach."
Regardless, thanks to more public awareness of how mass produced food and drugs could be dangerous
due to folks like Harvey Wiley and books like The Jungle, now...more than at any
point before in history...Americans demanded the federal government DO
SOMETHING ABOUT THE FOOD AND DRUGS DANGIT. Heck, The Jungle even got the attention of President
Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt usually wasn’t a fan of Sinclair due to his socialist positions,
but The Jungle convinced him the government needed to get involved, writing “radical action must be
taken to do away with the efforts of arrogant and selfish greed on the part of the capitalist.”
And now, Congress generally agreed with him. On June 30, 1906, Roosevelt signed both The
Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. The Federal Meat Inspection Act
makes it illegal to tamper with or misbrand meat and meat products being sold as food and also
allows the federal government to regulate the meat industry in order for there to be sanitary
conditions. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, also called the Wiley Act in honor of Wiley’s
efforts over the years to get it passed, banned foreign and interstate traffic in tampered with
or mislabeled food and drug products and allowed the federal government to regulate and inspect
certain food and drug products. It also required that active ingredients be placed on the label
of a drug’s packaging and described certain purity thresholds that all drugs had to meet.
Both laws were pillars of the entire Progressive Era. Originally, the Department of Agriculture
was in charge of carrying them out. It was a big task and not easy. In a 1911 Supreme Court case
called U.S. v. Johnson, the Court ruled that the Pure Food and Drug Act didn’t ban false
therapeutic claims, but only false or misleading statements about the ingredients or identity of a
drug. In response, the next year Congress passed the Sherley Amendment to fix that. In 1914,
the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act officially made drug use a crime for the first time
and allowed for more regulation of how doctors prescribed and pharmacists distributed narcotics.
The regulatory agency in charge up to this point within the Department of Agriculture
was the Bureau of Chemistry. Later, it expanded and became the Food, Drug,
and Insecticide Administration in 1927. Three years later, the name was shortened to the Food
and Drug Administration, or FDA. The FDA gained more authority when another President Roosevelt,
this time Franklin Roosevelt, signed the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act on June 25,
1938, which was actually a set of laws that replaced the Pure Food and Drug Act.
It brought cosmetics and medical devices under control and made it so drugs had to be labeled
with adequate directions for safe use. Not only that, and this a big freaking deal let me tell
you...it required pre-market approval of all new drugs. In other words, a drug manufacturer
would have to prove to the FDA that a drug was safe before it could be sold to the public.
In the following months and years, there would be many amendments and Supreme Court decisions
that increased the influence and power of the FDA even further.
In 1960, when the creators of thalidomide, a drug used as a sedative or tranquilizer, sought
approval from the FDA to sell it in the United States, FDA inspector Frances Kelsey blocked it,
saying further safety studies needed to be made on its use. Now, the FDA did this even though
other countries around the world had already been selling and distributing the drug. Well,
as it turns out, more than 10,000 babies were born with severe birth defects caused by thalidomide.
The FDA’s work on thalidomide helped further legitimize the agency and President John F.
Kennedy praised Frances Kelsey. It also helped lead to even further drug restrictions. The
Kefauver-Harris Drug Amendments of 1962, signed by President Kennedy,
required drug producers to provide SUBSTANTIAL evidence showing that a drug was not only safe,
but was actually effective for the purpose for which it was intended.
Other big laws that changed the scope of FDA work
included the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act of 1967, the Orphan Drug Act of 1983,
and the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011. Other laws like the Drug Price
Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act, sped up the FDA regulation process.
Regardless, today the FDA is part of the Department of Health and Human Services.
It has an annual budget of almost $6 billion and more than 18,000 employees. Its headquarters is in
White Oak, Maryland, but it also has 223 field offices and 13 laboratories throughout
all 50 states. It’s led by the United States Commissioner of Food and Drugs,
who is currently this lady here. Janet Woodcock. She’s a doctor who has been with
the FDA since 1986 and you probably haven’t heard of her, have you? You probably don’t
believe me that her name is actually Janet Woodcock. Well it is so stop it.
Now, she has got some criticism in recent years. The FDA definitely dropped the ball
when it came to regulating opioids like Oxycodone in recent years.
But overall, the FDA continues to be an important force for good for public
health in the United States. Guess who has been issuing emergency use authorization
for all those COVID-19 vaccines in recent months? The FDA. You better believe it. And
it’s not just food and drugs. They even have a hand in things like lasers and cell phones.
Today, the FDA has huge regulatory oversight over products that affect all of us Americans.
You can’t avoid them, so it’s good to know about them. Oh, and most agree that’s good to have them
looking out for us. Thanks FDA. (drinks Coke) I don’t taste cocaine in this. This is disgusting.
Yeah this video is not sponsored by Coca-Cola.
But it IS sponsored by my Patreon supporters and by Skillshare. Skillshare is an online
learning community with thousands of inspiring classes for creators. Explore new skills, deepen
existing passions, and get lost in creativity. So some of you may not realize this, but I’m also
a musician. I actually use a lot of my own compositions as background music for my videos.
Wait, you don’t care? Anyway, I recently checked out Young Guru’s song mastering class
on Skillshare to make my songs sound better. It taught me how to maximize the sound of my songs
so that they had some punch and volume. But there aren’t just music production classes.
There are also classes that teach you new skills in illustration, graphic design,
video editing, creative writing, and more. Skillshare is curated specifically for learning,
meaning there are no ads, and they’re always launching premium classes, so you can stay focused
and follow wherever your creativity takes you. And now you can try one of Skillshare’s new live
classes. Experience real-time inspiration as you connect with popular teachers,
all while working along with other members. Hey, the first 1,000 of my subscribers to
click the link in the description will get a free trial of Premium Membership so
you can explore your creativity. Check it out. Skillshare! Right on.
Don’t forget to check out Patrick Kelly’s video about how a literal Snake Oil Salesman
changed medicine forever. I’ve linked his video in the description of this video.
So what do YOU think about food? And drugs? And lasers? Let me know in those comments.