I600 A657 1879

PREFACE.

IT is self-evident that a law to be most effective in preventing the adulteration of food and medicine should be general or national in order to secure universality and uniformity of action, and to prevent the transfer of the sources of adulterated articles from States having preventive laws to States having none; or from States having good laws, well enforced, to States having imperfect laws, or laws imperfectly carried out.

It is equally evident that, under the form of government of this country, an United States law for such purposes is inadmissible.

Therefore, the only wise course appears to be to thoroughly, temperately, and widely investigate and discuss the subject throughout the nation; and by proposed laws and criticism upon them, to bring out all the difficulties to be met by such laws, and the best way to meet them.

Then, if from such material and such knowledge, a good law, or the best practicable law, could be drawn up, little or no effort would be needed to get all the

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States to enact it, starting from some large State like New York, where it is most needed. In this way the effect of a general law would be easily and finally obtained, while the objections to an United States law would not be encountered.

With the purpose of aiding in this or any other plan whereby the object may be best attained, the following propositions are submitted.

E. R. SQUIBB.

BROOKLYN, March 4, 1879.

ROUGH DRAFT OF A PROPOSED LAW

TO PREVENT

THE ADULTERATION OF FOOD AND MEDICINE,

AND

TO CREATE A STATE BOARD OF HEALTH.

BY E. R. SQUIBB, OF BROOKLYN.

To the Medical Society of the State of New York:

THE subject of a law to prevent the adulteration of Food and Medicine has throughout the past year been under consideration by a joint committee made up of representatives from the New York Academy of Sciences, the New York Academy of Medicine, New York County Medical Society, the Therapeutical Society, New York College of Pharmacy, New York MedicoLegal Society, the Public Health Association, and the American Chemical Society, and considerable time has been devoted to the examination of the subject; and two or three drafts of laws besides this have been prepared and submitted to discussion.

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After a review of some part of the experience of Great Britain under the "Sale of Food and Drugs Act" of 1875, and a consideration of the chief difficulties it has encountered up to this time, the present writer believes that any law, to be effective and of easy application, must carefully avoid certain points of difficulty which have been brought out by the British law.

First. The law must so clearly define the offense of adulteration in all its various forms, even by repetition in wording the definition where this may be useful, as to make the various forms of the offense plain to the understanding of the persons who adulterate, rather than by general definitions to leave too much to be decided only by litigation in the courts. If the offense be well defined to the person who adulterates, the first effect will be to prevent or deter him. Failing in this, it will make the facts establishing the offense so clear as to economize the time of the courts and law officers, and leave to them to decide mainly upon the character, turpitude, and degree of the offense charged, and thus adjust and apply the penalty. Hence, in the draft of a law here presented, the defining clauses might be construed by the careful logic of a legally trained mind as mainly repetitions of one idea. Yet to the minds of the class of shrewd money-makers in the community, to whom, and to whose practices the definitions are really addressed, the looseness of a general phraseology would fail in deterring them from taking the chances of dis

covery and conviction. And again, under this head, and for these same reasons, the standards for comparison by which the offense is to be determined, should be a part of the law, and be much more definite than by the British law.

To illustrate the utility of careful and clear definitions of various known forms of the offense as aimed at by the different defining clauses, one or two typical instances of common adulterations are given in the margin of each defining clause to show its special application.

Secondly. The questions of intent to defraud, and of injury or prejudice to the purchaser of adulterated articles, either as to health or to cost, are carefully avoided, because in a definite, fully recognized shape they are often entirely wanting in the adulterator, and are always difficult to prove. A very large proportion of the adulterations practiced are not attempts at fraud, nor designed to damage health, but are straining efforts to make money. And these efforts are so earnest and so intense, energetic, and absorbing as to leave all other considerations in the background. That the public is hurt and cheated is often but an accident rather than a malicious intention.

In place of these, the adulterator is made responsible for the effects of his acts in their more definite and physical relations to the public, and to the penalties imposed upon them. The offense then consists in the act of de