“What do you think of the 100 patients who died due to sulfanilamide medication poising?”
I’m familiar with it and it was awful. I believe they paid out substantial monies in compensation. And there was already plenty of law on the books to deal with it.
FDA Commissioner Walter Campbell, who was then pressing for better federal regulation of drugs, pointed out how the inadequacy of the law had contributed to the disaster. “It is unfortunate that under the terms of our present inadequate Federal law, the Food and Drug Administration is obliged to proceed against this product on a technical and trivial charge of misbranding. ...[The Elixir Sulfanilamide incident] emphasizes how essential it is to public welfare that the distribution of highly potent drugs should be controlled by an adequate Federal Food and Drug law. ... We should not lose sight of the fact that we had many deaths and cases of blindness resulting from the use of another new drug, dinitrophenol, which was recklessly placed upon the market some years ago. Deaths and blindness from this [drug] are continuing today. We also should remember the deaths resulting from damage to the liver that have occurred from cinchophen poisoning, a drug often recommended in such painful conditions as rheumatism. We also have unfortunate poisoning, acute and chronic, resulting from thyroid and radium preparations improperly administered to the public.
“These unfortunate occurrences may be expected to continue because new and relatively untried drug preparations are being manufactured almost daily at the whim of the individual manufacturer, and the damage to public health cannot accurately be estimated. The only remedy for such a situation is the enactment by Congress of an adequate and comprehensive national Food and Drugs Act which will require that all medicines placed upon the market shall be safe to use under the directions for use. ...”
Caveat emptor and all that.
So how do you square this with Article 1, Section 8 and the 10th Amendment?