212  Laws  intended  to  Regidate  Pharmacy.  {AMMay 
Am.  Jour.  Pharm. 
1874. 
to  ourselves  and  the  progress  to  pharmacy  comes  in,  is  difficult  to  see. 
But  that  is  not  all ;  for  if  that  Board  of  Pharmacy  gets  judgment 
against  a  poor  "  dealer  in  drugs,"  in  a  police  court  or  other  retail 
court  of  justice,  he  will  have  to  close  his  shop  and  sell  his  business. 
In  this  free  country  of  ours,  poverty  ought  not  to  be  a  bar  to  justice, 
for  if  that  dealer  possesses  the  means  he  will  appeal  the  case  to  the 
Supreme  Court  of  Illinois ;  or  if  a  Kenfcuckian,  to  that  of  his  State, 
and  receiving  an  adverse  decision  there,  he  appeals  it  to  the  Supreme 
Court  of  the  United  States,  where  he  will  obtain  a  judgment  that 
would  stagger  any  Board  of  Pharmacy  !  It  will  then  be  his  turn  to 
bring  an  action  at  law  against  that  Board  of  Pharmacy  and  those  in- 
corporated colleges  for  damages  and  costs  caused  him  by  their  uncon- 
stitutional interference  with  his  civil  rights,  and  that  Board  would 
certainly  ask,  what  are  we  going  to  do  about  it  ?  They  might  peddle 
licenses  for  selling  drugs  and  poisons  to  all  the  dealers  in  hardware, 
dry  goods  and  groceries  in  the  rural  districts  of  Illinois,  but  that  is 
out  of  the  question,  it  is  unconstitutional.  That  their  power  of  regis- 
tration and  examination  is  practically  equivalent  to  nihil,  needs  not 
to  be  mentioned. 
All  that  any  one  of  the  States  can  do,  is  to  enforce  a  most  compre- 
hensive law  prohibiting  the  promiscuous  sale  of  drugs,  regulate  the 
sale  of  poisons  and  the  manufacture  and  sale  of  quack  nostrums, 
popularly  called  patent  medicines  ;  it  may  also  comprise  the  adultera- 
tion of  drugs  but  in  doing  so  must  entirely  abstract  from  profes- 
sional qualification.  Such  an  act  might  also  include  all  those  articles 
which  under  any  circumstances  or  by  accidents  may  become  injurious 
or  dangerous,  on  the  ground,  as  has  been  said  before,  of  public  policy 
and  for  no  other  reasons. 
If  a  State  would  create,  maintain  and  enforce  a  system  of  medical 
and  pharmaceutical  supervision,  there  might  be  such  a  thing  as  phar- 
macy, but  then  it  would  have  to  establish  a  pharmacopoeia,  an  official 
formulary,  published  according  to  its  orders,  containing  all  the 
medical  and  pharmacal  preparations,  which  ought  and  can  be  kept  on 
hand  by  the  pharmacist.  In  securing  the  public  health  against  the 
dangers  of  empiricism  and  the  deceiving  seductions  of  the  charlatans, 
it  would  be  at  the  same  time  a  reliable  guide  to  the  practitioner,  and 
to  the  administration  a  means  to  assure  order  and  supervision.  But 
the  Pharmacopoeia  of  the  United  States  of  America  lacks  all  these 
essential  particulars ;  the  majority  of  druggists  do  not  spend  the  cost 
