100,000,000 Guinea Pigs
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| Author | Arthur Kallet and Frederick J. Schlink |
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| Country | United States |
| Subject | Consumer movement |
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100,000,000 Guinea Pigs: Dangers in Everyday Foods, Drugs, and Cosmetics is a book written by Arthur Kallet and F.J. Schlink first released in 1933 by the Vanguard Press and manufactured in the United States of America. Its central argument propounds that the American population is being used as guinea pigs in a giant experiment undertaken by the American producers of food stuffs and patent medicines and the like. Kallet and Schlink premise the book as being “written in the interest of the consumer, who does not yet realize that he is being used as a guinea pig…”
The book's key proposition is that a significant portion of the products sold to the public—particularly pharmaceuticals and food products—are released with little regard for or knowledge of how these products adversely affect the consumer. Corporations, often knowingly, release products which either do not do what they purport to do, or have dangerous side effects or defects. Furthermore, many officials and government departments, namely, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, have fallen victim to regulatory capture.
The book goes on to state that the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 is not effective in arresting these trends, and real reform or consumer protection is obstructed by the powerful connections that offending corporations have with the government.
If the poison is such that it acts slowly and insidiously, perhaps over a long period of years (and several such will be considered in later chapters), then we poor consumers must be test animals all our lives; and when, in the end, the experiment kills us a year or ten years sooner than otherwise we would have died, no conclusions can be drawn and a hundred million others are available for further tests.
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