U.S. Food and Drug Administration

Public alarm over adulterated food and fraudulently marketed medicines, sharpened by Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle and its depiction of unsanitary meatpacking practices, drove Congress to pass the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906, the first federal law prohibiting interstate commerce in adulterated or misbranded food and drugs.

Harvey Washington Wiley, chief chemist of the Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Chemistry, had campaigned for the law for years and was placed in charge of enforcing it, giving the Bureau an entirely new regulatory mission alongside its original research functions. The enforcement function was reorganized several times over the following decades, becoming the Food, Drug, and Insecticide Administration in 1927 as a distinct body within the Department of Agriculture, before an Agricultural Appropriations Act shortened its name to the Food and Drug Administration in 1930. The agency remained part of the Department of Agriculture until 1940, when it moved to the Federal Security Agency, and its authority expanded substantially over the twentieth century through further legislation covering cosmetics, medical devices and pharmaceutical safety testing, giving it broad jurisdiction over any product marketed with a therapeutic claim, a jurisdiction that would eventually bring it into direct conflict with Wilhelm Reich's orgone therapy.

The FDA's best known intersection with the history of fringe science is its pursuit of the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who from the late 1940s marketed orgone energy accumulators, wooden and metal lined cabinets he claimed concentrated a universal life energy with therapeutic and even cancer curing properties. The agency concluded Reich's claims for the devices were false and unsupported by scientific evidence, and on 10 February 1954 it filed a complaint seeking an injunction against interstate shipment of the accumulators and the literature that accompanied them. Reich refused to appear in court, arguing that to do so would concede the government's authority to judge scientific questions, and the court entered a default injunction ordering accumulators recalled and destroyed and Reich's books withdrawn from sale.

When Reich and his associate Michael Silvert continued distributing accumulators in violation of the order, the FDA brought criminal contempt charges, and in 1956 Reich was convicted and sentenced to two years in federal prison; he died of heart failure in the Lewisburg penitentiary in November 1957 after serving about eight months. The case remains one of the most cited instances of direct FDA action against a figure from the psychical and esoteric research tradition, and whether the prosecution was a proportionate response to false medical claims or a state using contempt of court to silence a scientifically marginal but non-fraudulent researcher is still debated, a question this Atlas treats as open rather than settled.

Sources Wilhelm Reich et al. v. United States (239 F.2d 134)United States Court of Appeals, First Circuit with American Inquisition: The FDA's Persecution of Wilhelm ReichJonathan Turley