DRUGS ON THE MARKET

We all thought the Bonus Boys and the Anti-Saloon League had good lobbies at the Capital. But their purposes and methods become incidental chicanery compared to the organized crime perpetrated by the retail drug concerns and their gag rule over the American press. When young girls are going blind from the effects of eyelash brightener, when the American Medical Association traces dozens of deaths to a supposedly harmless remedy for rheumatism, when drug cures for gallstones are sold at every pharmacy, and it is known that the infirmity can only be cured by operation, it appears time to divert these Borgias to a new table.

Unfortunately for most attempts at reform, the advertising accounts of the pharmaceutical concerns buy them favorable publicity from almost every news organ they care to patronize. When the Tugwell-Copeland pure food and drug bill, demanding honest advertising, comprehensible analyses of each product on every label, was introduced in Washington early last December, the machine set to work to picket its trough. They were so successful that many of the magazines and newspapers in which they took space to ballyhoo their panaceas actually backed them in their concerted attack against this measure. From appeals to the rights of man as stated in the Constitution to tearful notes to General Johnson claiming that such legislation would put almost a million men out of work, their speciousness saw no bounds. The harmonious swinishness of the quack doctors never saw better proof than their protest against legislation which should prove a blessing to the honest members of the drug trade.