554 
Pure  Drugs  and  the  Public  Health. 
{Am.  Jour.  Pharm. 
December,  1914. 
of  a  little  additional  care  in  keeping  the  preparation  have  evidently 
combined  to  change  this  preparation  from  one  that  was  considered 
to  be  uniformly  impure  to  one  that  complies  fairly  well  with  the 
spirit  though  not  the  exact  letter  of  the  present  pharmacopceial  re- 
quirements. Disregarding  the  frequent  presence  of  a  preservative, 
only  8.7  per  cent,  of  the  preparations  examined  were  found  to  be 
deficient  in  strength  or  contaminated.  This  figure,  when  one  con- 
siders the  unstable  nature  of  the  product,  compares  very  favorably, 
indeed,  with  the  low  percentage  (7.5  per  cent,  of  samples  of  olive 
oil  rejected  during  the  same  period). 
Oil  of  turpentine  is  another  product  that  is  rapidly  being  im- 
proved, and  the  economically  closely  related  linseed  oil,  while  still 
above  the  general  average  for  all  of  the  products  reported  on  during 
19 1 2,  also  evidences  a  marked  improvement  over  previously  reported 
conditions.  These  two  products  are  very  widely  used  for  technical 
purposes  and  occupy  rather  an  anomalous  position  as  drugs.  The 
frequency  with  which  they  are  now  found  to  be  of  inferior  quality 
is  no  doubt  due  to  the  fact  that  little  or  no  attempt  has  as  yet  been 
made  to  regulate  their  identity  or  purity  for  technical  purposes,  and 
because  of  the  much  lower  price  of  the  impure  technical  products  they 
are  very  frequently  sold  in  place  of  the  official,  or  pharmacopceial, 
articles  for  medicinal  use. 
The  opposite  of  these  rather  promising  conditions  is  shown  in 
connection  with  asafcetida,  a  drug  product  of  somewhat  uncertain 
value  that  is,  nevertheless,  used  quite  extensively,  largely  perhaps 
because  of  its  penetrating  odor  and  disagreeable  taste.  The  pharma- 
copceial requirements  for  this  drug  are  unnecessarily  high  and  the 
chemical  tests  for  identity  and  purity  quite  inadequate.  It  is,  there- 
fore, not  at  all  surprising  to  learn  that  more  than  78  per  cent,  of  the 
samples  of  asafcetida  examined  did  not  comply  with  the  require- 
ments of  the  Pharmacopoeia. 
This  drug  is,  however,  but  one  of  a  number  of  articles  that  are  of 
uncertain  medicinal  value,  are  difficult  to  control  from  a  chemical 
point  of  view,  and  are  more  frequently  found  to  be  below  standard 
than  above.  This  one  fact,  that  there  are  hundreds  of  more  or  less 
widely  used  drugs  for  which  we  have  little  or  no  data  on  which  to 
base  a  chemical  control  of  the  finished  preparation,  serves  to  further 
illustrate  the  difficulty  of  exercising  any  adequate  control  of  medi- 
cinal preparations  through  a  city,  State,  or  Federal  laboratory. 
That  some  form  of  control  is  essential  is  evidenced  by  the  head 
