ABSTRACT
What factors caused the American drug market to evolve from one of the least regulated markets in the world to become one of the most regulated and safest drug markets in the world?
Few things have affected the practice of pharmacy in the United States as profoundly as federal legislation, or more to the point, the lack of it in the nineteenth century. The very first article of the U.S. Constitution in 1787 granted Congress the power to grant patents and copyrights to inventors and authors to profit from their work.1 Congress passed the first patent Act in 1790 and the first modern patent law was passed later, in 1870. These patent laws gave rise to a proliferation of medicines of various standards of quality known as “patent medicines.” More precisely, patent medicines were really proprietary medicines, because in order to obtain a patent, manufacturers would have been obliged to reveal the ingredients of their products, which they were not interested in doing. For the most part, all patent medicines were made from the same herbs, fruit juices, alcohol, and sometimes contained narcotics such as opiates or cocaine. Instead, these medicine makers patented their labels, bottles, and trademarks in order to claim their market niche. From the beginning of the Republic until 1906, patent medicine makers were free to make sensational therapeutic claims for their untested and unproven products.2
