Healthy Skepticism Library item: 9186

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

Marks HM.
Revisiting "the origins of compulsory drug prescriptions".
Am J Public Health 1995 Jan; 85:(1):109-15
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=7832245

Abstract:

It has been argued that today’s prescription drug market originated in the arbitrary acts of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which in 1938 issued regulations creating a class of drugs that could be sold by prescription only. On the basis of the FDA’s administrative records, I argue that the 1938 regulations on prescription drug labeling were initiated by industry and then agreed to by the FDA; that contemporaries understood and accepted the reasons for restricting the use of certain drugs; and that the subsequent evolution of these regulations is best understood as an FDA effort to limit industry abuses of the prescription labeling system. This decade-long war of position ended when drug manufacturers persuaded the US Congress to enshrine their version of prescription labeling in law in a highly politicized struggle over government’s role in the economy.

Keywords:
Drug Industry/history History, 20th Century Legislation, Drug/history* Prescriptions, Drug/history* United States United States Food and Drug Administration/history*