Dale Gieringer On The Slippery Slope to Prohibition
How the 1906 'Pure Foods and Drug Act' practically empowered the U.S. Department of Agriculture to ban dilute cocaine, thus shifting the market of that drug to the infinitely more dangerous concentrated forms .... ... and to go further, how lying about cocaine was meant to protect markets for Tobacco. That was evident with the 1906 Act's limiting the USDA's authority over substances in the U.S. Pharmacopoeia, from which Tobacco had been deleted in 1905, and the 1910 USDA Farmers' Bulletin article "Habit Forming Agents- Their Sale and Use a Menace to the Public Welfare" , which decried the use of Coca against Tobacco, so described as " what is commonly believed to be a comparatively harmless habit" - authored by L.F. Kebler. Yet it was Kebler, who in 1912 testified at a U.S. House of Representatives COMMlTTEE ON lNTERSTATE AND FORElGN COMMERCE hearing on the Food and Drug Act, that " tobacco and preparations of tobacco contain arsenic an