ABSTRACT
Federal drug regulation in nineteenth-century America was a fleeting phenomenon, limited in part by a lack of both scientific capacity and sustained political exigency. Citizens stood a better chance of being safeguarded by their own states, though the legislation and enforcement varied widely in this period. But by the turn of the twentieth century, Connecticut,
Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, the Oklahoma territory, California, and most other states had outlawed drug adulteration and/or failure to label a medicine that had morphine, cocaine, digitalis, nux vomica, chloroform, cantharides, strychnine, ergot, or a host of other substances (1,2). Typically, violations were considered misdemeanors and penalized accordingly. But absent a federal proscription, it was all the protection a citizen might hope for.
