POISONING BY MISTAKE.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXX, Issue 4307, 9 January 1875, Page 2

POISONING BY MISTAKE.

TO THE EDITOR. Sib, —I did not know what the law was regulating the sale of poisons until I read your note appended to my letter suggesting that druggists should be required to"keep their poisons on a different shelf from ordinary drugs, and also in different colored bottles. Druggists, on the authority of Coroner Spratt. are at present liable to make the slight mistake of “hastily taking down one drug for another." But since you have published section 12 of the Sale of Poisons Act, IS7I, I find nothing in it at all regulating how poisons are kept in a druggist's shop before they arc sold. The regulation that you have recited refers entirely as to what is to be done in reference to poisons after sale, and not how they are to be kept before sale, to prevent the selling druggists making slight mistakes such as Coroner Spratt thinks so lightly of. I think the law provides against storing gunpowder in dangerous quantities, and also for storing petroleum, but there seems to bo no law for regulating the storage of deadly poisons kept for sale even in a druggist’s shop, where mistakes are so easily made by absent-minded druggists, and there irust be many such absent-minded persons vendors of medicines. I think society is altogether to blame for any mistakes that may be made for the want of such regulations in the Sale of Poisons Act. If there had been such regulations as 1 suggested, it is probable that the unfortunate druggist at Masterton would never have fallen into the fatal mistake he did.—l am. Ac., Cxurioir.