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."
Criticism of the Food and Drug Administration
After his resignation, from his post as Commissioner of the Food and Drugs Administration in December 1969, Dr. Herbert L. Ley, Jr. In an interview to "The New York Times", warned the public about the FDA’s inability to safeguard consumers. People were being misled, he believed “The thing that bugs me is that the people think the FDA is protecting them - it isn’t. What the FDA is doing and what the public thinks it’s doing are as different as night and day,” he said. The agency, in his opinion, did not have the motivation to protect consumers, faced budget shortfalls, and lacked support from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Dr. Ley was critical of Congress, the Administration and the drug industry, stating that he had "constant, tremendous, sometimes unmerciful pressure" from the drug industry, and that the drug company lobbyists, combined with the politicians who worked on behalf of their patrons, could bring “tremendous pressure” to bear on him and his staff, to try preventing FDA restrictions on their drugs. Ley stated that the entire issue was about money, “pure and simple”. On December 15, 1999, interviewed for the oral history program of the FDA History Office, Dr. Ley shared that from the first controversy in his tenure as FDA Commissioner he had a "gut feeling" that his life expectancy at the FDA was probably limited. He said he had done everything by the book, both in the FDA and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and he thinks that what the Administration was really wishing, was that he would stonewall the whole Academy report, because it was goring too many pharmaceutical companies.