PROVING DEATH
In life insurance adjudication you have to prove the death of the insured. Can the death of the Bureau of Chemistry be established? The following quotations from the hearings before the appropriation committee consfdering the agricultural bill for the fiscal year, 1928, are illuminating, and leave little doubt of death. The Chairman of the committee, in speaking of the Enabling Act, said: Q. "I wish to take up now this new language, the 'enabling' paragraph. This is new language, is it not?" A. "Yes, sir. The food and drugs act provides that examination of products subject to its jurisdiction shall be in the Bureau of Chemistry. Under the new arrangement the Bureau of Chemistry goes out of existence and is supplanted by this new organization, the food, drug, and insecticide administration." The chairman also calls attention to the demise of the Bureau of Chemistry in other parts of the report. He speaks of the "new Bureau of Chemistry and Soils." In another place he mentions the appropriations for the proposed Bureau of Chemistry and Soils. In the next paragraph is found the following statement: "Under this appropriation we enforce the so-called pure food law which controls purity and freedom from misbranding of foods and medicines." This is a most appropriate designation. Under the administration of the law as now conducted it is only a "so-called" pure food law. Its activities are confined chiefly to misbranding of foods and medicines. The real pure food law was designed principally to protect our foods from additions of poisonous and deleterious substances, a feature which has been almost entirely obliterated by the present administration of the law. No one could have found a more appropriate qualifying phrase than that which is used above. In another part of the hearings the Chairman of the subcommittee asks: "In other words, this is an appropriation for the enforcement of what is known as the pure food law?" to which this reply was made: "To insure freedom from misbranding of foods and drugs." This answer confirms the present attitude of the food administration.
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