PATENT MEDICINES.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 11752, 9 February 1918, Page 4

PATENT MEDICINES.

A Masterton chemist has paid the penalty which follows irrational legislation, by being subjected to a fine for innocently selling a bottle of patcut medicine containing a certain quantity of alcoholic spirit. It is not an offence to stock these pateait medicines, or to sell them on a doctor's order. But tho chemist cannot be trusted to exercise the slightest discrimination. ]f a man was to fall in a faint- in the street, and hurried into a chemist's shop it would be an offence for the chemist to give him a nip of whisky, or any other stimulant containing alcohol, without a doctor's prescription. The whole thing smacks of hypaluting humbug. The wonder is that a doctor's prescription is not a condition precedent to the sale of methylated spirits, or eau do cologme, or other articles which are at time~employcd as substitutes for "the real Mackay." In our efforts to regulate the social habits of the ppople by legislation, we are making ourselves supremely ridiculous, 'The poorer classes will not thank the Legislature for requiring tliem to expend three half-crowns in procuring a doctor's prescription in order that they may be relieved of those common, everyday complaints to which mankind is heir.