What 1906 U.S. law regulated food and drug safety?

The 1906 U.S. law that regulated food and drug safety was the Pure Food and Drug Act. Signed by President Theodore Roosevelt on June 30, 1906, it was a landmark Progressive Era consumer-protection law.

The act targeted adulterated or misbranded foods and medicines moving in interstate commerce. Drug labels had to identify certain dangerous ingredients, including alcohol, opium, morphine, cocaine, and cannabis. The law also recognized standards set by the United States Pharmacopeia and National Formulary.

Its passage followed years of campaigning by USDA chemist Harvey Washington Wiley, whose “Poison Squad” experiments tested the effects of food preservatives, and by journalists who exposed unsafe products. Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle intensified public pressure, although the book focused primarily on meatpacking conditions and helped inspire separate meat-inspection legislation.

A common mix-up is calling this the law that created the modern FDA. Enforcement initially belonged to the USDA’s Bureau of Chemistry; that bureau was later reorganized, and the agency adopted the name Food and Drug Administration in 1930. The 1906 act was eventually replaced by the broader Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938.