Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Sulfanilamide Disaster

Episode Date: July 7, 2021

In the 1920s, before the era of consumer protection, a poison entered the medicine supply and killed more than 100 people before the pubic health disaster could be stopped. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck, just a couple of

mellow dudes about to talk about one of the worst public health disasters in American history. All right. That's right. And this one came about because we were just talking about this in a full length episode and little Joshie said, hey, we should do a short stuff on that thing. And bada bing, bada boom. Two days later, we're doing it. Yeah. Not even two days. I think it's the next day in podcast land time. Oh, sure. So it just came out. Yeah. We activated our immediate response team, which is us. Yes. And we're going to do one on the elixir sulfonylamide disaster.

Sure. All right. How would you say it? Sulfonylamide? That's what I'm going with. All right. Hey, man, potato, potato, sulfonylamide, sulfonylamide. Let's call the whole thing off. Exactly. By the way, I know this is a short stuff, so there's really no time to discourse, but I hate that song. Let's call a whole thing off. Yeah. Hate it.

Yeah. I told you, I think one time about my friend, Andrew in Los Angeles, whose friend auditioned with that song for a big musical production. And it never heard it really and didn't realize that you were supposed to say them differently. So you say tomato and I say tomato. You've just seen the sheet music? I guess so. I mean, that was the story. I don't know if it checks out, but it's pretty funny. Sounds like an Andy Kaufman performance art piece. So we're not talking about that. We're going back to 1937. Back in the time where there was

such a thing as the FDA, there was something called the 1906 Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act. No, Pure Food and Drug Act, sorry, of 1906, which we talked about yesterday. And one of the things that it did was it said, there is this thing, this Bureau of Chemistry that will become the FDA, but they're just kind of there. They're not really good at what they do yet because we don't have the regulation to let them do what they do. And so under that context, the idea of medicines was pretty much like the Wild West in America at the time. Yes, I think that's putting it very kindly. Earlier in that same decade, there was a microbiologist named Gerhard Domach and said, hey, I made a great

discovery. This compound sulfonylamide or nylamide acts as an antibiotic against strep, and we can help strep throat. And pharmaceutical companies said, this is great. Let's pump out this powder and these tablets. And then someone at the Essie Massengill Pharmaceutical Company out of Tennessee said, you know what, people really want this in liquid form, get to work. Yeah, there was a guy, the chief chemist was Dr. Harold Watkins, and he started getting to work because they told him to, and that was his job, and that was that. And so he started tinkering around. He needed a solvent, something to dissolve the powdered sulfonylamide into a solution water because it doesn't just automatically dissolve. So he used the solvent diethylene glycol,

and he ended up coming up. Yeah, just seeing that on a label somewhere, wouldn't you be like, I'm going to second guess this decision. How about this deadly poison? He went whole hog on it. And so he came up with elixir sulfonylamide, which is 10% sulfonylamide, the antibiotic, 16% water, and 72% diethylene glycol. Yeah, a lot of that. Yeah. And it gave it a sweet flavor, so the taste was good. It gave it a pinkish hue. He added a little bit of raspberry extract and said, let's hit the market. Yeah. And I guess I kind of spoiled it a second ago, but it is a deadly poison. Yeah. And as you mentioned in the other episode, it's related to antifreeze, which is not good to drink. And it kills you in horrific ways. It really wrecks your kidney. Your kidneys

will eventually shut down, but along the way, you will be vomiting and agitated and have seizures and convulsions, terrible, intense pain, unrelenting pain. And they didn't know this because they didn't carry out any tests on this stuff, not just to make it, but to sell it. They didn't even test it out before they put it on the shelves, mainly because the law didn't say you had to at the time. No, but did you see that quote about... Yeah....that described the massingale company? I think even among under the law, they were kind of seen as renegades, right? Yeah, the quote was from the investigator. Apparently, they just throw drugs together, and if they don't explode, they're placed on sale. And that's at that time, like in the 30s, right? So the massingale company,

they made 240 gallons initially of elixir sulfonylamide of this deadly, deadly poison, and started shipping it around the country as medicine in September of 1937. And within just a couple of weeks, the first deaths were starting to be reported. Yeah. And it wasn't like these days where they find something like, oh, this could cause a risk of cancer down the road. Like you drink this stuff and you die. Yeah. Yeah. It was that bad. Yeah. So I say we take a break. The sulfonylamide elixir is out there. It's starting to kill people, and we need to get some commercial messages in. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough,

or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and

make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop?

But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so Chuck, the AMA was around at the time. It was our poison control episode. Remember we said the AMA was formed in part as a response to this idea that people were being poisoned and we didn't know why? So the AMA, like they were keeping track of sulfonylamide, but they had not heard of this Se massingill stuff and

they started getting reports of people taking it and dying from it. And they wanted to get to the bottom of that too sweet. Yeah, so they called them up and they said, hey, you mind just send over that ingredient list our way and massingill did. And here's the thing, they didn't really realize at the time what the deal was. Like they had to do all these, they weren't like, wait a minute, it's got diethylene glycol in it. Yeah, there you go. That's what's killing people because it had only been around, I think, less than a decade or so. And obviously they didn't know where they wouldn't have used that. Like I don't think they willfully tried to kill people. No, no, certainly not. But the AMAs, you know, they had to do tests and they started

sort of ruling things out. And they eventually found out that like, yeah, 70, whatever, 2% of this stuff is a deadly poison. And we need to start getting the message out to newspapers and radios and telling people this. But, you know, that's tough to do in those years. It is because as we'll see, the FDA sent a bunch of agents out and they were trying to get in touch with the traveling salesmen for massingill who were like, you know, they didn't have cell phones. They would, you know, maybe leave a forwarding address at a hotel that you'd have to go shake down. Yeah, turn the road. You go, yeah, you go chase that down and you find that they were already two cities beyond that last forwarding address. And you're doing this in

the context of like this race against the clock, that there's 240 gallons of this stuff out there and people are being prescribed it. And you're trying to find this traveling salesman who can point you in the direction of where these things were shipped to. Yeah, they also got in touch with massingill. And they went, yeah, we know it's killing people. And we're trying to get it back too. We sent out these memos and on the wire and these telegrams saying that, you know, we'd like this stuff back and it could be dangerous. And then the FDA said, no man, send different telegrams saying you have to do this. It is killing people. Right. And they did, I mean, they complied. You get the impression that the massingill company was rather reluctant partner to the FDA at the time.

Yeah. But they did eventually do, they took all the right steps that the FDA was kind of directing them to. And so the FDA sent out all those field agents and the field agents would have trouble, you know, tracking down a salesperson. Sometimes when they got in touch with one of these salesmen, they would be worried about the company's image. So they would just not tell them who they sold these things to. And so they'd have to go through sales slips at, you know, pharmacies around the country. And when they would finally get in touch with doctors and pharmacists, they'd be worried about their own legal liability. So they wouldn't be forthcoming with any of this information too. It must have just been really frustrating, you know. Yeah. I mean, so we've got doctors that aren't

really cooperating. Some of them did. I think there was one story that you found where a doctor actually postponed his wedding just to help find one patient whose family had moved to the mountains with his sick kid and took a bottle of that stuff along that the doctor had given him. But, you know, somewhere more cooperative than others. I think the FDA, they didn't have the teeth at the time that they do now. And they could not force a recall of a drug. They were able to through sort of a loophole in that it was called elixir in on the label. It was labeled as such. But apparently, unless it contains alcohol, it's not an elixir. Isn't that right? Yeah, it should have been called solution sulfonylamide. And the fact that they called it

elixir meant that technically it was mislabeled. And the FDA did have the ability to seize drugs that were mislabeled under the 1906 Act. Thank God. Yeah. But that was it. It was like getting alcapone on tax evasion. They were able to get this antibiotic back on this technicality that it was misnamed. But that's what they proceeded under. And so they were able to eventually get 234 gallons in one pint of the 240 gallons that had been produced. Yeah, very great effort. I think in the end, 105 men, women and kids were killed, I think. Or was it, that's total, right? Yeah, 71 adults and 34 kids. Okay. And they said if they hadn't, I mean, if that loophole hadn't existed, that amount of liquid would have ended up killing about 4,000 people. Yeah. And I mean, depending

on how they were prescribed, how much they were prescribed, some of them died in two days. Some of them took three weeks to die and they all died agonizing deaths. But the idea that, you know, thousands more people could have died had the FDA not been able to do something about it is pretty, you know, he's got a wiper forehead with that one. Yeah. Dr. Harold Watkins that we mentioned, the Massingill chief chemist, he took his own life. Very sadly, there was a lot of survival's guilt, a lot of physicians, as well as people that worked at Massingill. We're just wrecked with guilt afterward for a long time. One of the doctors from Mount Olive wrote to the president, to FDR and said, please pass some more oversight measures over medicines,

because six of my patients, including my best friend are now dead because of what I gave them. Yeah. That doctor, I have to give a shout out, is quoted in a 1981 FDA consumer magazine article with the title, taste of raspberries, taste of death. Colon? No joke. That's it. No colon? No colon comments then. All right. It should have been colon, the rise and fall of the deadly elixir. Right. Colon. There was another death related to it too, Chuck. Remember how we were saying, you said that the FDA just didn't have any, the teeth to make, to enforce this. Well, they got the teeth. There had been legislation kicking around in Washington to update that 1906 act. When this happened, the public outcry was so

much that it helped this logic and get it passed, but it was under the championship of Senator Royal Copeland of New York, who sponsored that bill. He dropped dead of exhaustion four days after it was passed. Whenever I see that, I think, and what else? Yeah. Like how many bags of cigarettes did he smoke? I think there was a what else for sure. But you know, I mean, like I think, I think there was some truth to it. No, I agree though. I think that that was, I think that's wise to take, died of exhaustion as a grain of salt. Agreed. You got anything else? How much salt did he eat? You can die from salt. Just, it has nothing to do with exhaustion. I got nothing else. Good one. Promise kept. Yes,

fulfilled the next day even. And since we're done, everybody, that means short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.