Am.  Jour.  Pharm. 
December,  1914. 
}    Pure  Drugs  and  the  Public  Health.  555 
of  one  of  the  leading  drug  houses  in  England,  who  is  reported  as  say- 
ing that  the  thousands  of  samples  of  crude  drugs  examined  annually 
in  his  laboratories  yield  abundant  evidence  to  show  that  constant 
and  efficient  control  is  necessary  if  the  purity  of  medicinal  products 
is  to  be  maintained  and  progress  achieved  on  the  lines  of  modern 
science. 
The  reports  of  the  several  officials  intrusted  with  the  enforcement 
of  laws  relating  to  the  production  and  sale  of  drugs  have  emphasized 
time  and  again  that  much  of  the  material  that  is  now  being  sold  as 
medicine  in  this  country  is  either  directly  harmful  or  absolutely 
useless,  and  that  from  a  public-health  point  of  view  considerable 
progress  is  necessary  before  the  consumer  is  as  adequately  safe- 
guarded as  he  should  be. 
It  is  generally  recognized  that  once  a  seal  is  broken,  a  package 
opened,  or  a  cork  drawn,  the  manufacturer  can  no  longer  be  held 
responsible  for  the  content  of  the  package,  and,  quite  irrespective  of 
the  nature  of  the  medicine,  the  pharmacist  in  dispensing  a  portion 
of  an  original  package  assumes  all  responsibility  for  the  nature  and 
purity  of  the  article. 
That  this  responsibility  of  the  pharmacist  is  as  yet  not  appre- 
ciated and  that  much  progress  must  be  made  in  the  enforcement  of 
existing  laws  before  the  public  is  as  adequately  protected  as  it  should 
be,  or  has  a  right  to  expect,  is  evidenced  by  the  shortcomings  of  the 
pharmaceutical  preparations  included  in  the  table  referred  to  above, 
particularly  those  preparations  usually  made  on  a  comparatively 
small  scale  in  the  retail  drug  store.  From  the  point  of  view  of  State 
or  national  officials,  these  preparations  offer  the  most  serious  diffi- 
culties in  the  way  of  control,  through  the  intervention  of  Federal  or 
State  laboratories,  and  yet  they  are  of  considerable  importance  from 
a  medical  point  of  view  in  that  they  include  some  of  the  most  widely 
used  medicines  we  now  have.  It  has  been  well  said  that  medicine, 
particularly  the  use  of  medicines,  as  a  science  can  make  little  or  no 
progress  until  physicians  know  more  of  the  nature  and  composition 
of  the  articles  they  use  as  medicines  and  of  the  action  or  influence 
of  these  articles  on  the  healthy  as  well  as  the  diseased  organisms. 
How  little  actual  reliance  can  be  put  in  the  average  drug  prepara- 
tion at  the  present  time  will  be  appreciated  when  we  learn  that  fully 
50  per  cent,  of  such  widely  used  articles  as  aromatic  spirit  of  am- 
monia, spirit  of  camphor,  tincture  of  iodine,  tincture  of  opium,  spirit 
