Patent medicine fraud escaped prosecution because laws left buyers to assume the risk
Evidence
For one, there was no regulatory state of the kind we now take for granted-no FDA to test medicines before they were sold to the public. Efforts to charge sellers of potions with violating common law had largely failed: their promises were gratuitous, and quaffing a product was an assumption of risk by nineteenth-century legal standards. In addition, the press had long displayed little interest in offending an industry that was perhaps its greatest single source of advertising revenue.*2 That changed in 1905, when the editor of Collier’s Weekly, one of the new muckraking magazines, commissioned Adams to investigate mischief in the patent medicine business. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 109
Categorization
- SEED: Essay angle: how the 19th-century caveat emptor legal standard functionally served as deregulation—the legal doctrine of ‘assumption of risk’ as a subsidy to fraud.
- XREF: The press’s silence about its biggest advertiser parallels modern media’s reluctance to criticize platform ads—echoes of the attention economy’s structural conflicts. — connects to: Patent medicines were primarily alcohol, narcotics, and fraud rather than medicine — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 112; Deferred prosecution lets serious corporate wrongdoers buy their way out of liability