Page 3 - Pharmacy History 22 Mar 2004

PMAC to MEC – the story of registration of medicines in Victoria
By David Newgreen B.Pharm, MBA, FPS
Project Officer with the Pharmacy Board of Victoria and lecturer in Forensic Pharmacy at the VCP, Monash University and Latrobe University Bendigo.
Aglance at any of the newspapers, especially local newspapers, of the 19th
century will show many examples of advertisements for medicines.
By today’s standards, many of the claims for efficacy would be regarded as quaint, excessive or even absurd. Some of the advertisements were
for medicines made by individual pharmaceutical chemists while others came from manufacturers and a number from quacks.
The early 20th century
By the 20th century, quackery was well and truly flourishing around the world and the situation in Australia was no exception, as described in Philippa Martyr’s recent book, Paradise of Quacks.1-2, 27
In 1906, a wealthy Sydney businessman named Octavius Beale, who had an interest in social problems, persuaded the Commonwealth Government to appoint him as a one-man Royal Commission to inquire into patent or proprietary medicine... drugs, alleged curative agents, toilet articles, foods and drinks, the composition of which is not disclosed, and which are alleged to have medicinal or remedial properties. Beale produced a two-volume report which disclosed a horrifying record
of the criminal unscrupulousness of manufacturers and advertisers and of the limitless gullibility of the public. He said,
The whole present practice of self- dosing, induced by universal and uncontrolled lying and deception, exposes the people, poor and rich, clever and simple, to ill-health, discomfort, misery, suffering and untimely death.3
Shortly after that, the British Medical Association wrote a damning report on secret formulas.4
volume 2 ■ no 23 ■ July 2004
David Newgreen
There were already general laws in place that allowed the Department
of Health to prohibit the sale of
any patent or proprietary medicine that was deleterious to health and
also general powers relating to the publishing of false statements. Poisons Acts had been in operation since
the 1870s but had limited success in controlling the sale of medicines.
An important British report on patent and proprietary medicines published in 1914 made a number
of recommendations including one which said that a registration number, abbreviated R.N., should appear
on remedies permitted to be sold; another was a list of therapeutic claims that should not appear on labels or in advertisements. The recommendations were intended for consideration throughout the British Empire.23
They stopped short, however, of an evaluation component.
In response to these exposes, State Governments introduced laws to restrict the claims that could be made on labels or in advertisements
for patent or proprietary medicines for human use and these continued until fairly recently. Advertisements were not allowed to claim that such diseases as cancer, infantile paralysis, or epilepsy could be cured; nor could any advertisement say that a medicine was a cure for baldness, corpulence, or for drunkenness or the liquor habit; or that it would develop the bust, raise the height or eradicate wrinkles.
These controls were more or less uniformly adopted throughout the British Empire.
Stock medicines
While such limits were placed on medicines for human use, the same could not be said for animal medicines and so unregulated was the situation that, in 1933, state ministers for agriculture agreed that that each
state should enact laws calling for the registration of stock medicines. Queensland, New South Wales and Tasmania were first and Victoria followed in 1938 with the passing of the uncontroversial Stock Medicines Act 1938.
The reasons for the legislation were stated thus: From time to time the need for legislation to control the sale of stock medicines, vaccines and so
on has been brought under notice by various organisations. All these bodies have stressed the fact that there are being sold throughout the country so-called stock remedies for which extravagant and absurd claims are made, and the prices asked for them are in most cases high.5 The legislation had an uneventful passage through Parliament although several comments are worth quoting: It is a fairly drastic measure, involving a large measure of disclosure and also the destruction of property rights;
It is, of course, infinitely worse when quacks sell nostrums for the cure of human ills, bringing the following
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