History of the Food and Drug Administration
In June 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt signed into law the Food and Drug Act, also known as the "Wiley Act" after its chief advocate. The Act prohibited, under penalty of seizure of goods, the interstate transport of food which had been "adulterated," with that term referring to the addition of fillers of reduced "quality or strength," coloring to conceal "damage or inferiority," formulation with additives "injurious to health," or the use of "filthy, decomposed, or putrid" substances. The act applied similar penalties to the interstate marketing of "adulterated" drugs, in which the "standard of strength, quality, or purity" of the active ingredient was not either stated clearly on the label or listed in the "United States Pharmacopoeia" or the "National Formulary". The act also banned "misbranding" of food and drugs. The responsibility for examining food and drugs for such "adulteration" or "misbranding" was given to Wiley's USDA Bureau of Chemistry.
United States Adopted Name
The USAN Council began in June 1961 after the AMA and the USP jointly formed the AMA-USP Nomenclature Committee. The American Pharmacists Association (APhA) became the third sponsoring organization in 1964, at which point the name of the committee was changed to the USAN Council, and United States Adopted Name became the official term to describe any nonproprietary name negotiated and formally adopted by the Council. In 1967, a liaison representative from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was appointed to serve on the USAN Council. The FDA announced in 1984 that it would discontinue adding drug names to its official list and use the USAN as the established name for labeling and advertising new single-entity drugs marketed in the United States. The AMA Council on Drugs no longer exists as a separate entity. FDA now has a representative on the USAN Council, which has moved away from chemically derived names.