OUR FOOD AND DRUG G-MEN

Kearney, Paul W.

Our Food And Drug G-Men By PAUL W. KEARNEY WHEN kidnapers or bank robbers or hijackers are on the loose, you know who protects you from them. But when a dangerous hair-wave solution comes on the...

...In any normal month they'll seize over 100 shipments of contaminated or filthy food, turning the cases over to the Department of Justice for prosecution if need be...
...It was OK...
...or an improperly made sulfa drug brings agonized death to 105 innocent victims—who are the G-Men who protect you then ? The answer is, the hard-working inspectors and scientists of the Food and Drug Administration...
...All swore there had never been arsenic in the house...
...which inflicted some 30,000 people with a form of paralysis—or a frightful thing called "Lashlure" which turned pretty girls who used it into blinded hags—there are milder excitements such as "green tea" made of lawn clippings ; "pure Italian olive oil" cut with any one of 20 different cheap oils...
...But the fifth, it now appeared, had been bought by "the lady who came around selling vanilla extract...
...It was an arsenical insect spray bought in bulk at the local druggist's...
...On cereal products alone, in the fiscal year '42-'43, there • were 560 court actions...
...The owner went to court—and lost...
...Chewing tobacco manufacturers use considerable of this paste, and since chewing tobacco is not defined as food we request permission to dispose of this shipment to this trade...
...A long distance call ascertained that this firm had agents who covered the country, recruiting temporary local saleswomen...
...Last year these men inspected over 56,000 samples of foods, drugs, and cosmetics collected at random: prosecuted, enjoined, or confiscated the products of more than 3,000 distributors of adulterated or dangerous goods...
...the entire field force of 239 inspectors and chemists worked night and day, nobly assisted by thousands of state and local food, drug, and health officials and by newspaper warnings and radio broadcasts...
...Generally a flood makes sewers back up, and food supplies on railroad sidings, in warehouses and store basements suffer...
...The stuff has in it a powerful synthetic never intended for human use, and all stocks are confiscated...
...He had left a lucrative law practice to take a "temporary" job in the bureau...
...Further prowling uncovered a recent death which bore all the earmarks of the elixir...
...The gift of a grateful patient, it had made his wile and two visitors deathly ill...
...Our chief job now is watching over human fallibility rather than cupidity...
...The food industries have spent millions cleaning up and modernizing their plants...
...In the sulfa case one physician in South Carolina told the inspector that he had dispensed the medicine to five patients, none of whom died...
...The Canadian Government was notified, men were sent to the three addresses, and at one the fruit cake was found, still intact...
...she had sent that to a nephew in Canada...
...tomato puree made from decayed fruit...
...Paul B. Dunbar, who had long been his principal associate...
...In May of this year he retired and was succeeded by Dr...
...From other sources the inspector found that four of the doctor's patients had died...
...looking for mouldy cream...
...the agent in that territory, who alone knew the names of his agents, was on his way to Oklahoma for the holidays...
...In Bailey's Cross Roads they went from door to door until they found a man whose sister sold vanilla extract...
...This is a valuable provision of the new Food & Drug Law belatedly passed in 1938 as a result of the sulfanilamide atrocity...
...nut meats in packages brought up to weight with pumpkin seeds...
...The cost was to be borne partly by the packers, and all approved products would bear an official stamp of the U. S. Food & Drug Administration...
...If they aren't concerned with something as dramatic as "Ginger Jake"—a beverage made with a varnish thickener (for ginger flavor...
...Back went the inspectors to the cake baker's neighborhood to start a patient door-to-door canvass...
...And when they work up evidence on a case, it stays worked up...
...One prescription was in the name of "Willie Smith...
...A case in point involves the shrimp packers who for years had been at loggerheads with the Food & Drug men...
...But his sister had gone away for the holidays...
...What lady...
...the Food & Drug men start one of those fruit cake hunts on a large scale, but 15 people die before all of the 1,000 ampules which had gotton into the trade are rounded up...
...There were, it seemed, three nephews up there but he didn't know where any of them lived...
...Complaints come in about a new pad designed to help girls achieve an up-swept hair-do: after use, many develop what looks like virulent poison ivy...
...but a few laggards have to be watched...
...On top of other duties, the Administration analyzes and tests every new drug that comes the f \rket— at the rate of about 125 a month—before it is cleared for sale...
...The judge eyed him solidly for a long moment, spat a lusty gob of tobacco juice in his cuspidor, and said, "Motion denied...
...Instead, 633 shipments, ranging from one pint to one gallon, went from four branches scattered from New York to San Francisco...
...While conditions are by no means perfect, the vast majority of businessmen support us as heartily as we support them against unfair competition," said Commissioner Campbell before his retirement...
...Mysterious deaths are reported...
...vitamin pills which show startling "vitamin deficiencies...
...Daily the field men make their rounds, weighing butter in this warehouse...
...There the inspector found a bottle with some of the elixir left in it—the doctor's name still legible on the label...
...They turn their attention with equal facility to huge corporations or humble housewives making a little pin money out of home baking...
...All this stuff had to be traced through wholesalers, jobbers, retail druggists, doctors, and patients—and quickly...
...Nor do the drug companies themselves always cooperate...
...in fact, she had baked five others which she had sold to neighbors...
...Every New Drug Tested There's never an idle moment for the food and drug G-Men...
...Perplexed, the inspectors returned to the house and fine-combed it, without result until one, rummaging through rubbish in the yard, found an empty paper bag with the remains of a powder which contained arsenic...
...Promptly they checked the flour still on sale by the dealer who had supplied it...
...In Louisville, over a million dollars worth of food had to be condemned and destroyed after the big flood a few years ago...
...Simple tests on six guinea pigs would have shown the makers that this stuff was deadly, but they were not made...
...In a single city, inspectors found that 49 prescriptions had been filled from one shipment of the stuff...
...Out West a pitchman is selling a patent medicine in the dime stores, warranted to cure all ills...
...Finally they found a customer who recalled hearing the still-nameless canvasser say that she had a brother in Bailey's Cross Roads, Va...
...And the fruit cake...
...Hurry calls rounded up four of the cakes, untouched...
...the local inspector sends a bottle to Washington...
...in addition, 671 physicians' samples of one or two ounces were sent out in about six weeks...
...One month they condemned 50 per cent of all the fish imported into Detroit because of a parasitic growth in the flesh...
...Similarly, the flour of the jobber at the mill where it had originated was OK...
...A quick analysis showed the presence of arsenic, and in a jiffy the inspectors were off for the woman's house...
...What hadn't been used in the garden presumably had been dumped by one of the children into the flour crock...
...The lengths to which some food people go in fighting • seizures are amazing...
...So Washington headquarters is equipped with about $1,500,000 worth of scientific apparatus and technical gear, manned by a diligent staff of bacteriologists, pharmacologists, analytical chemists, biologists, and other specialized technicians...
...She didn't know her name, but the label on the bottle gave the manufacturer's name and address, out in the Middle West...
...In another city 20,000 sales slips in one wholesale drug house had to be examined in order to track down every sale...
...canned fish that has putrefied...
...A pharmaceutical house unwittingly lets a drug get out among surgeons in a powerful'concentration commonly used by eye specialists...
...Once a shipment of fig paste had been condemned because it was full of maggots...
...Cooperation Sometimes Lacking Perhaps the most stupendous feat of the some 900 members of this bureau was in connection with the sulfanilamide preparation which caused 105 known deaths...
...A 'Temporary' Job For 37 Years Walter G. Campbell was for 37 years the energetic head of this hard hitting organization...
...A Dozen Lives Saved Meanwhile, other inspectors questioned the family of the woman who had baked the cakes...
...More than 200 salesmen were' interviewed...
...On the relief rolls there were six Willie Smiths, each one of which had to be run down before the prescription was recovered...
...But when the flour on hand in the kitchen was tested, it fairly reeked with arsenic...
...After hundreds of seizures and court actions, which the packers consistently lost, an arrangement was worked out in 1934 under which shrimps could be canned under continuous Federal inspection...
...The G-Men of the Pantry and Medicine Cabinet are also Johnny-On-the-spot at floods, conflagrations, or any major disaster which may involve the contamination of foodstuffs...
...The inspectors went through the aunt's personal effects, and found letters from three different Canadian addresses...
...For the remaining 10 per cent—in this field and any other—the basic laws still apply—and you can bet your bottom dollar our food and drug G-Men will enforce them to the best of their ability...
...Thanks to the quick, painstaking labor of these G-Men of the Pantry, a dozen lives were saved...
...picking up samples of flour for ultra-violet laboratory tests to show whether or not rats have been playing in it...
...You'd think that the bureau would have the wholehearted cooperation of doctors and druggists, but that isn't always so...
...over 1,100 telegrams sent...
...Then his attorney said to the judge: "We believe that under the law this fig paste can be sold for any non-food use...
...It was a colored man, and when his family were questioned they told the inspector that, according to their custom, all the medicines, glasses, spoons, etc., that the dead man had used were placed on the grave...
...Although any concern is free to accept or reject this service, fully 90 per cent of the canned shrimp now marketed in interstate commerce is packed under this supervision...
...Bad reports have come in from users...
...But when a dangerous hair-wave solution comes on the market, badly burning, even killing, its users...
...when a shipment of baby food goes out containing rotten fruit...
...Campbell had gathered together the finest specialists he could lay his hands on—-men who every year turn down tempting offers from private business—and meshed them into a smooth-functioning team with enormous influence and universal prestige...
...enriched" bread with no enriching...
...when an eyebrow dye comes out that blinds the unsuspecting...
...The only identification was that Willie was on the relief rolls...
...One nationally known pharmaceutical house, cited for selling thousands of "adulterated and mis-branded" sulfathiazole tablets, was so lethargic about getting the drug off the market that the bureau took the case to court and obtained a conviction and fine...
...And in Cincinnati the inspectors found several carloads of coffee, covered with slime, being "salvaged" by the owner for sale...
...Oh, yes...
...tests on rabbits show it contains a dangerous poison which quickly blinds them, and the entire stock is seized...
...Yes, she had baked that cake...
...For instance, just before Christmas a doctor came into the Washington headquarters with a piece of fruit cake...
...Fines run up to $5,000 in these cases...

Vol. 8 • July 1944 • No. 28


 
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