Food and Drug Administration

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is one of the oldest comprehensive consumer protection agencies in the U.S. federal government, tracing its origins to 1862 as the Division of Chemistry in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The agency's modern regulatory functions began with the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906, driven by Harvey Washington Wiley, who is considered the "father of the FDA." The agency underwent several name changes and organizational restructurings throughout its history. It became the Bureau of Chemistry in 1901, was renamed the Food, Drug, and Insecticide Administration in 1927, and finally shortened to the Food and Drug Administration in 1930. The FDA moved from the USDA to the Federal Security Agency in 1940, then to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1953, and finally to the Department of Health and Human Services in 1980. Today, the FDA employs approximately 15,000 people with a budget of $4.4 billion as of 2014. The agency regulates products representing about 25% of consumer spending, including most food (excluding meat and poultry), human and animal drugs, biologics, medical devices, radiation products, cosmetics, and animal feed. Its headquarters is located at the White Oak Campus in Silver Spring, Maryland, with over 150 field offices and laboratories nationwide. The FDA's regulatory authority extends to approving clinical trials for experimental drugs, including controlled substances like psychedelics. In the early 1990s, the FDA approved Rick Strassman's DMT trials, marking the first sanctioned human psychedelic research in decades and providing an institutional framework for investigating hypotheses about endogenous DMT production.