The FDA: Cleaning Out the Medicine Chest

In 1962, Congress gave the U.S. Food and Drug Administration a franchise to rule on the efficacy as well as the safety of all new drugs offered for licensing. The lawmakers also invited the FDA to tackle a forbidding and involved cleanup job. From 1938 to 1962, some 7,000 new drugs had been marketed and during that period the FDA had final say on their safety but not their efficacy. The assignment from Capitol Hill was to recheck all of the drugs to determine whether they worked as advertised.

On the Shelves. Lacking...

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