safe, the fraud from the genuine, lies from
truths.

Legislation is needed to crystallize modern knowledge and to establish
in courts the right to protection against the evils of patent
medicines. The national Pure Food Law, passed January 1, 1907, and now
in force throughout the country, requires on the "labels of all
proprietary medicines entering into interstate commerce, a statement of
the quantity or proportion of any alcohol, morphine, opium, heroin,
chloroform, cannabis indica, chloral hydrate, or acetanilid, or any
derivative or preparation of any such substance contained therein; this
information must be in type not smaller than eight-point capital
letters; also _the label shall embody no statement which shall be false
or misleading in any particular_." This law does not forbid patent
medicines nor the use of alcohol and narcotics in patent medicines; it
merely says, "Let the label tell, that all who _buy_ may read." It does
not require that all who _run_ may read, for _it does not say that
advertisements of a patent medicine shall tell the truth about its
ingredients or its action on the human body_; only that the label on
the bottle shall tell. The object of this law is to explain to the
consumer the exact nature of the medicine. But to the majority of
people the word "acetphenitidin" on the label of a headache medicine
does not explain. The new order that requires manufacturers to
substitute acetanilid for acetphenitidin does no more than replace fog
with mist. Protection requires legislation that cannot be evaded by
technical terms. The present law requires that packages must be
properly labeled _on entering the state_. To carry out the national
law, state laws should make it an offense for dealers to have in their
possession proprietary medicines without explanatory labels that
explain. Where state laws to this effect do not exist, the packages
once in the state may be deprived of their labels and sold as secret
remedies, thus nullifying the whole effect of the national law.

Enforcement must be insured. Impure drugs may do as much harm as patent
medicines containing harmful drugs. In New York a vigorous campaign was
recently inaugurated by the department of health to drive out impure
drugs. Drugs are dangerous enough at their best. When they are not what
they pretend to be, whether patented or not, they may take life. One
extreme case where a patient's heart was weakened when it ought to have
been stre