Court Opinion

ID: 9420084
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:52:54.275606+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:22.359062
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Frankfurter,
dissenting.
If it takes nine pages to determine the scope of a statute, its meaning can hardly be so clear that he who runs may read, or that even he who reads may read. Generalities regarding the effect to be given to the “clear meaning” of a statute do not make the meaning of a particular statute “clear.” The Court’s opinion barely faces what, on the balance of considerations, seems to me to be the controlling difficulty in its rendering of § 301 (k) of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, 52 Stat. 1040, 1042; 21 U. S. C. § 331 (k). That section no doubt relates to articles “held for sale after shipment in interstate commerce and results in such article being misbranded.” But an article is “misbranded” *706only if there is “alteration, mutilation, destruction, obliteration, or removal of the whole or any part of the labeling of, or the doing of any other act with respect to, a food, drug, device, or cosmetic.” Here there was no “alteration, mutilation, destruction, obliteration, or removal” of any part of the label. The decisive question is whether taking a unit from a container and putting it in a bag, whether it be food, drug or cosmetic, is doing “any other act” in the context in which that phrase is used in the setting of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and particularly of § 301 (k).1
As bearing upon the appropriate answer to this question, it cannot be that a transfer from a jar, the bulk container, to a small paper bag, without transferring the label of the jar to the paper bag, is “any other act” when applied to a drug, but not “any other act” when applied to candies or cosmetics. Before we reach the possible discretion that may be exercised in prosecuting a certain conduct, it must be determined whether there is anything to prosecute. Therefore, it cannot be put off to some other day to determine whether “any other act” in § 301 (k) applies to the ordinary retail sale of candies or cosmetics in every drug store or grocery throughout the land, and so places every corner grocery and drug store under the hazard that the Administrator may report such conduct for prosecution. That question is now here. It is part of this very case, for the simple reason that the prohibited conduct of § 301 (k) applies with equal force, through the same phrase, to food, drugs and cosmetics insofar as they are required to be labeled. See §§ 403, 502, and 602 of the Act.
*707It is this inescapable conjunction of food, drugs and cosmetics in the prohibition of § 301 (k) that calls for a consideration of the phrase “or the doing of any other act,” in the context of the rest of the sentence and with due regard for the important fact that the States are also deeply concerned with the protection of the health and welfare of their citizens on transactions peculiarly within local enforcing powers. So considered, “the doing of any other act” should be read with the meaning which radiates to that loose phrase from the particularities that precede it, namely “alteration, mutilation, destruction, obliteration, or removal” of any part of the label. To disregard all these considerations and then find a “clear meaning” is to reach a sum by omitting figures to be added. There is nothing in the legislative history of the Act, including the excerpt from the Committee Report on which reliance is placed, to give the slightest basis for inferring that Congress contemplated what the Court now finds in the statute. The statute in its entirety was of course intended to protect the ultimate consumer. This is no more true in regard to the requirements pertaining to drugs than of those pertaining to food. As to the reach of the stattute — the means by which its ultimate purpose is to be achieved — the legislative history sheds precisely the same light on the provisions pertaining to food as on the provisions pertaining to drugs. If differentiations are to be made in the enforcement of the Act and in the meaning which the ordinary person is to derive from the Act, such differentiations are interpolations of construction. They are not expressions by Congress.
In the light of this approach to the problem of construction presented by this Act, I would.affirm the judgment below.
Mr. Justice Reed and Mr. Justice Jackson join in this dissent.

 “The alteration, mutilation, destruction, obliteration, or removal of the whole or any part of the labeling of, or the doing of any other act with respect to, a food, drug, device, or cosmetic, if such act is done while such article is held for sale after shipment in interstate commerce and results in such article being misbranded.”