THE PHARMACY AND POISONS BILL
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
SIR,--I read with interest the letter signed by W. Arbuthnot Lane, headed The Pharmacy and Poisons Bill," in your issue of June 6th. In these letters, which apparently Sir W. Arbuthnot Lane is sending to all the newspapers in the country, he overlooks the most vital fact when he talks about the useless and inconvenient safeguard of confining the sale of poisons to chemists' shops. He is, apparently, unaware that the method which is now suggested under the Pharmacy and Poisons Bill was tried for seventeen years and abandoned. The Arsenic Act of 1851 did exactly in regard to arsenic what this Bill will do in regard to poisons generally. Yet in 1868 it was found necessary to pass another Poisons Act and create qualified chemists in whose
hands the sale of poisons was placed. Since that time, with an exception in favour of agricultural and horticultural poisons, the sale of scheduled poisons has been restricted to chemists by law.
Sir W. Arbuthnot Lane would have everybody believe that under the present law disinfectants are not obtainable by the housewife. This would not be the case even if all disinfectants were poisons, which they are not ; there are many reliable disinfectants which are not scheduled poisons, but even with those which are scheduled poisons, I deny emphatically that any member of the public need (or does) have the slightest difficulty in obtaining supplies, with the thousands of chemists' shops" selling' disinfectants.
Sir W. Arbutlmot Lane apparently imagines that if every small retail shop of any kind whatsoever can sell poisonous disinfectants in the future, the health of the nation is going to be improved. We, as chemists, suggest that the common sense view is that such indiscriminate handling of poisons would be dangerous to the community, and we cannot under- stand how it can be argued that the public, which at the present time has sufficiently easy access to disinfectants will use disinfectants more freely because they are presumably to be sold by every shop. We cannot believe that the public will appreciate the need for the use of disinfectants to any greater extent on that account.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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