1 10 
The  Food  and  Drugs  Act. 
Am.  Jour.  Pharm. 
March,  1907. 
As  regards  the  subject  of  drugs,  the  work  of  Samuel  Hopkins 
Adams  in  Collier's  Magazine,  together  with  the  assistance  of  Mr. 
Bok  in  the  Ladies'  Home  Journal,  is  too  well  known  to  require  repe- 
tition, and  yet  I  fear  that  the  force  of  these  arguments  is  lost  upon 
many  persons  who  look  upon  them  as  the  fulminations  of  yellow 
journalism.  Nothing  could  be  further  from  the  truth.  The  half 
has  never  been  told  and  the  real  truth  will  probably  never  be  known 
by  the  public  concerning  the  numerous  changes  which  have  been 
made  in  many  well-known  preparations  which  must  now  declare 
the  presence  of  certain  constituents  which  are  enumerated  in  the 
body  of  the  law.  Among  the  better  known  of  these  substances 
may  be  mentioned  alcohol,  morphine,  opium,  cocaine,  chloroform, 
chloral  hydrate,  cannabis  indica  and  acetanilide. 
Many  proprietors  of  nostrums  which  have  been  entirely  dependent 
upon  their  alcoholic  strength  for  their  medicinal  and  remedial  effect, 
have  changed  the  formulas  so  as  to  be  less  liable  to  criticism,  still 
retaining  enough  of  the  original  features,  however,  to  make  them 
objectionable  to  those  who  see  through  the  subterfuge. 
The  number  of  persons  in  the  community  who  are  really  able  to 
judge  such  preparations  is  wofully  small  and  it  will  require  a  con- 
stant campaign  of  education  for  many  years  to  bring  the  every-day 
consumer  of  preparations  of  this  class  to  a  sense  of  his  personal 
responsibility  in  such  matters. 
Even  the  medical  profession  has  suffered  by  this  gigantic  bunco 
game. 
Antikamnia,  a  proprietary  preparation  which  was  advertised  for 
years  under  the  claim  that  it  was  a  definite  synthetic  compound,  in 
spite  of  the'  fact  that  every  one  who  knew  anything  about  organic 
chemistry  knew  better,  has  at  last  been  publicly  unmasked  as  a  mix- 
ture of  acetanilide,  caffeine  and  sodium  bicarbonate ;  and  in  refuge 
from  the  necessity  of  declaring  the  amount  of  acetanilde  upon  the 
label,  the  firm  which  makes  it  has  changed  the  formula  so  as  to 
substitute  phenacetine  for  acetanilide,  and  yet  the  same  unwar- 
ranted and  extravagant  claims  are  made  for  the  preparation  that 
were  made  before,  with  no  notice  to  the  medical  profession  that  a 
radical  change  has  been  made  in  its  composition,  and  entirely  ignor- 
ing the  stultification  of  the  former  claims  as  a  definite  uniform 
chemical  compound. 
Other  instances  might  be  cited,  but  enough  has  been  said,  I  think, 
