The Manawatu Herald. TUESDAY, SEPT 18, 1906. A POISONS TRUST.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXVIII, Issue 3713, 18 September 1906, Page 2

The Manawatu Herald. TUESDAY, SEPT 18, 1906. A POISONS TRUST.

The cheerless person who is tired of life, is able to get out of it with promptness and despatch in New Zealand. If he wants to poison himself, as he very frequently does, he need not go to the chemist’s shop for the wherewithal. You see, the chemist is apt to ask questions, because the Sale of Poisons’ Act forces the chemist and the medical man to get a declaration from the buyer stating the use to which the poison is to be put and other things. However much agony of mind might be visible in the features of a customer in a grocer’s shop, no grocer would hesitate to give him a packet of wax matches. Yet for a few pence a man may buy sufficient phosphorous to give himself the most painful death possible. You have never seen the word poison on a packet of matches yet. One has only to ring up a wholesale firm in any city of New Zealand in order to get enough cyanide of potassium —used in mining, picture-process work, etc. —to poison the whole community. • /

Ip a man wants to die very specially, he can of course visit a farm where rabbit-poisoning is in progress. He can burn his inside into ribbons by eating a few sticks of phosphorous, which lie about the farms of New Zealand as if they were blades of grass. A deputation of chemists waited on the Minister of Health the other day and wanted the said Minister to introduce a bill making it necessary for all sellers of poisons other than chemists and medical men to be registered. One does not of course go so far as to accuse chemists of being publicspirited enough to lessen the danger to the public, but one is able to see that if other people were prohibited from selling poisons, chemists and doctors would score. It would be better for most people other than chemists and doctors to be prohibited from selling poisons, but it would very materially increase the price of poisons used in large quantities commercially. You remember, of course, that although the chemist is a benefactor, he also benefits by his benefactions. A doctor who recently advocated the common use of sugar-of-railk said that it could be bought with a margin of profit to the seller at eighteenpence a pound. The benefactors behind the smells had been selling it at three shillings. You of course pay for the smell and the chemist’s education, his nice colored bottles and the mystery. Grocers are selling sugar-of-milk at one and threepence, and the benefactors are now selling it at eightenpence, just because of that doctor’s few words.

If the rabbit-poisoner had to pay the chemist one hundred and fifty per cent, over the usual price for his phosphorous he would poison fewer rabbits, and there would be

more chemists. If the retail chemist only could supply the Waihi mines with cyanide at a profit of three hundred and fifty percent., well, the profits of the Waihi Company would be exceedingly small. We believe that although the sale of poisons should be most stringently regulated, they should be so regulated that the chemist is still able to make a still huger profit than he now makes. The grocer who essayed to make one-fourth of the profit of the chemist habitually makes would be looked upon as a very wicked person indeed. * * * Much is being done by doctors and chemists and other very interested persons to put a spoke in the wheels of the quack, but in our opinion the quack who takes advantage of the credulity of human nature to sell a person a hallpennyworth of drugs and water for eighteenpence is no worse than the doctor or chemists who sells a similar concoction costing a similar sum for half-a-crown. In one case the public pays for the advertisements, and in the other for the smell and the education ani the mystery. There will come a day when people will have as much education as chemists, who by the way are not specially addicted to taking their own prescriptions. The fact that a chemist is expected to obtain a declaration from a customer is no proof that the person who has made the declaration will not go away and poison himself instead of the family cat or the mangy dog or the rabbits in his paddock. * * It is presumed by that deputation of chemists that spoke to the Minister of Public Health the other day that the imposition of a license fee upon people who sold poisons would place the sale of poisons in the hands of the chemists. Whether this would be a j?oon to the public or a boon to the chemists, the chemists themselves may say—but they won’t. This at least is sure. Whether chemists only are allowed to sell poisons, or whether the whole world is permitted to indulge in the sale, the person who wants to use poison illegally has plenty of advantages. Who has not got a pound or two of bluestone in these days of potato plague ? Arsenic ? Plenty at the boiling-down works or in the wall-paper or the common every-day green hat labels. The point is that everybody who wants to get out of the world will do it despite any regulation empowering chemists to supply the needful drugs. You do not cure a person of a suicidal mania by prohibiting the sale of bluestone to the storekeeper or the sale of commercial poisons to commercial people other than chemists and doctors. If the chemists are rent with the feeling that it is time for them to protect their fellow men, let them set out on every bottle of stuff they sell a list of its constituents. Let them charge less for a little smell in three ounces of water than for a solution of expensive drugs. Let them sell less drugs, Let them say over the counter that the customer would do better to eat fruit and drink fresh air than to imbibe medicine at half-a-crown a time. Let them think more of protecting the public than of getting the sole right to sell poisons. Let the mystery of the medical and the drug professions be less mysterious. Let the doctors write their prescriptions in understandable terms in English.

At present any medicine is good for the average person as long as it smells horribly and looks a wierd colour. If the chemists get hold of the sale of = commercial poisons in bulk, we shall have to introduce some millionaire to New Zealand to pay the bills. We can’t afford to spend half-a-crown to slay a rabbit, or spray potatoes at two •and six a piece.