Before becoming secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services and leader of the Make America Healthy Again movement, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was a swashbuckling environmental attorney who regularly took aim at the meat industry. He sued large meat companies and the Environmental Protection Agency over water pollution from factory farms, and criticized factory farming for its “unspeakable” animal cruelty and overreliance on feeding animals hormones and drugs.

For over a decade, a group of food safety, environmental, and animal welfare nonprofits has petitioned the US Food and Drug Administration — which Kennedy now oversees — to ban the use of one of the most controversial of those drugs: ractopamine hydrochloride.

Fed to pigs in the final weeks of their lives, ractopamine speeds up muscle gain so that pork producers can squeeze more profit from each animal. But the drug has been linked to severe adverse events in pigs, including trembling, reluctance to move, collapse, inability to stand up, hoof disorders, difficulty breathing, and even death. It also carries a number of environmental and human health concerns.

Earlier this year, the FDA denied the petition to ban the drug, arguing that current regulations ensure a “reasonable certainty of no harm to consumers.” While the agency doesn’t dispute that ractopamine can harm animals, and it halved the maximum dose in pigs in 2006, it has argued welfare issues can be mitigated by simply asking meat producers to handle ractopamine-fed animals more carefully — a response that the petitioning organizations called “toothless.”

This story was first featured in the Processing Meat newsletter

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The FDA didn’t respond to a request for comment in time for publication. Elanco, the pharmaceutical company that developed ractopamine, didn’t respond to an interview request for this story.

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