The Committee appointed by the Conference worked at once, and formulated a report based on a thorough investigation of the powers of the Food and Drug Act. The finding coincides with a previous legal opinion, written last year by Clarence Lewis, of New York, a lawyer who was formerly on the V. P. L. Executive Committee. The opinion is that there is ample power now in the Food and Drug Act to suppress all fraudulent contraceptives which contain drugs or chemicals. _The pertinent parts of this Act are given in Appendix No. 14._ * * * * * The Committee points out that while the Food and Drug Act can take care of fraud in drugs and compounds, neither it, nor any other legislation, can efficaciously apply to contraceptives as regards their harmlessness or harmfulness. For that depends upon the case. Some drugs are harmful if used in some ways, but not so in others. So also contraceptives which are not drugs or chemicals or compounds, but are articles. Their usefulness or harmfulness depends largely upon the conditions of their use. For discrimination as to methods in these particulars, the public would be dependent upon getting instructions from good scientific sources, just as they are in regard to any other matters of hygiene. It is not the business of the law to prescribe either methods in hygiene or to prescribe the sources from which the public shall receive instruction in hygiene. But it can and does protect the public from flagrant profiteering and fraud, in drugs and the like, by means of the Food and Drug Act. * * * * * Only one physician urged the old plea for “doctors only” legislation. The Conference was heartily with her in wanting people to have only the best instruction and to have it from competent doctors, but no restrictive legislation will achieve that goal. Proposals of this sort thus far have been open to the objection of being either class privilege, unenforceable, and inadequate even as a means of making knowledge available for the doctors themselves. She conceded that she could not herself devise any “doctors only” plan that would not be special privilege legislation. The next day she telephoned that she was convinced that education would have to be the main dependence. This doctor mentioned having consulted an English medical journal containing elaborate data on contraceptives, in the library of one of the New York Medical Societies. “But it was illegally put there,” said the conference members almost in unison. The law forbids all importation. “Medical boot-legging,” added the chairman. Letters were read from distant physicians, some of whose opinions have already been quoted on page 223.