Pure Food and Drug Act
The 1906 Act paved the way for the eventual creation of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and is generally considered to be that agency's founding date, though the agency existed before the law was passed and was not named FDA until later. "While the Food and Drug act remains a foundational law of the FDA mission, it's not the law that created the FDA. [Initially,] the Bureau of Chemistry (the precursor to the FDA) regulated food safety. In 1927, the Bureau was reorganized into the Food, Drug, and Insecticide Administration and the Bureau of Chemistry and Soils. The FDIA was renamed the FDA in 1930."
Legal history of cannabis in the United States
In 1972, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws petitioned the BNDD (which later became the DEA) to remove cannabis from the list of Schedule I drugs, in order to allow it to be prescribed by physicians. After a decade of legal battles in which the DEA refused to consider the petition, public hearings were finally held on the matter starting in 1986. In September 1988, after two years of extensive public hearings, DEA Chief Administrative Law Judge Francis L. Young ruled in favor of moving cannabis to a Schedule II classification, finding that "Marijuana, in its natural form, is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man." Young further concluded: "The evidence in this record clearly shows that marijuana has been accepted as capable of relieving the distress of great numbers of very ill people, and doing so with safety under medical supervision. It would be unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious for [the] DEA to continue to stand between those sufferers and the benefits of this substance in light of the evidence in this record." As Young's ruling was only a non-binding recommendation, however, it was rejected by DEA Administrator John Lawn in December 1989. The decision was upheld in 1994 by a U.S. Court of Appeals ruling.