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."
Medical cannabis in the United States
The classification of cannabis as a Schedule I drug was first challenged by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) in a 1972 petition to the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (which was merged with other agencies to form the DEA in 1973). After a decade of legal battles in which the DEA refused to consider the petition, public hearings were finally held on the matter beginning 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 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 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. In February 1994, a final ruling on the original 1972 petition was issued when a U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the decision to keep cannabis a Schedule I drug.