THE PHARMACEUTICAL JOURNAL. 
SECOND SERIES. 
YOL. IX.—No. XII.—JUNE, 1868 . 
THE PROPOSED LEGISLATION AFFECTING PHARMACY. 
At length, after many delays and difficulties, a “ Bill to Regulate the Sale of 
Poisons and alter and amend tile Pharmacy Act, 1852,” is fairly launched in 
Parliament; it has been introduced by so powerful an advocate to the House 
of Lords, that, if not interrupted in its course by the sudden stoppage of all 
parliamentary business, w r e may fairly hope for success during the present 
Session. The first reading took place on the 19th, and the second is fixed 
for the 28th instant. Earl Granville is one of the foremost champions of 
education, ever watching to advance it both by his authority in Parliament 
and his great influence in society, his name is identified with the cause ; 
therefore to no more appropriate person could the Council of the Pharmaceu¬ 
tical Society have appealed for assistance in securing the enforcement of an 
educational qualification for future chemists and druggists. 
That the public safety requires such a qualification nobody now thinks 
of denying ; the progress of general education has tended to spread abroad a 
knowledge of the danger as well as the value of many articles now used in 
medicine. There is no good without a certain admixture of evil, and this 
knowledge has its disadvantage ; it opens to the criminally-disposed more 
subtle means of mischief, and it is consequently of great importance to place 
those means, as far as possible out of the reach of such as would apply them 
thereto. Many attempts at legislation have been made within the last ten 
or fifteen years, but, being all based on impossible or impracticable regu¬ 
lations for the sale and storing of poisons, all have fallen to the ground. 
The Pharmaceutical Society has always felt it a duty to oppose these attempts, 
because of the false security on which they were based, and has ever enforced 
the principle that true safety lay in insisting on a full acquaintance with 
the power of poisons on the part of vendors. Such an acquaintance ren¬ 
ders a man unwilling, and even afraid, to entrust a dangerous article, and 
with it to some extent his own character, in the hands of the ignorant, the 
careless, or the criminal. We know that many a careful chemist has met 
with cases in which, after he has refused to sell oxalic acid or cyanide of 
potassium, his would-have-been customer has had it served to him a few doors 
off without either the name of the article or the word poison being affixed to 
the package. So long as the old bases of legislation only were insisted on, the 
Society consistently refused its co-operation in promoting measures which 
w ould indirectly have compelled them to sell poisons to all comers who could 
comply with the proposed form of application ; but when the one legitimate 
precaution which they had advocated was recognized by the Committee of 
the House of Commons in 1865, they then felt it their duty to render an ex¬ 
tension of the Pharmacy Act also a Poison Bill. 
VOL. ix. 2 N 
