Anyone who hasn’t seen this video from the movie theater in Red Dead Redemption should definitely watch this ;D It’s a great parody (though actually fairly accurate) of the Temperance League’s propaganda against the (legitimately dangerous) patent drug salesmen. 

For reference, Red Dead Redemption takes place in 1911.

Notable: In the movie, the ingredients on the bottles are shown, and the bottles don’t make any “miraculous” claims to cure on the label. The Pure Food and Drug act of 1906 required that all ingredients be shown, and though the salesmen could make whatever claim they wanted, the labels of the bottles couldn’t make any false claims (though the definition of “false” was very loose).

The Harrison Act of 1914 (I’ll go into it more sometime) effectively outlawed opiates and cocaine, and the Narcotic Drug Import and Export act of 1922 prohibited importation or exportation of narcotics, intended to wipe out the remaining non-medicinal use of the drugs.

The Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act of 1938 restricted drugs from using substances that “may be injurious to health”, which included almost everything non-narcotic that the remaining patent drugs typically used. This basically eliminated the last of the patent drug companies.