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
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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.
