“No registration of manufacturing, wholesale or retail druggists is required by law. The importation, manufacture and distribution of habit-forming drugs are now surrounded by fewer restrictions than are thrown about tobacco. The proposed law provides for records of each grain, from the time it leaves the manufacturer until it reaches the ultimate consumer. “Any druggist, wholesale or retail, may manufacture and market any proprietary medicine he may desire, containing certain quantities of these drugs, and offer it openly for sale, without the formality of a physician’s prescription. “The clause in the otherwise worthy and admirable National Pure Food and Drugs act requiring that any drug store composition containing any quantity whatsoever of any habit-forming drug must bear upon its label an announcement of this content, was well meant, but has worked havoc. “Even as no physician who administers a habit-forming drug to ease his patient’s pain should acquaint that patient with the nature of the drug he gives, lest the patient turn again to it when pain recurs and fasten something worse than pain upon himself, despite the doctor’s wishes, so no medicine offered for general sale and bearing on its label the announcement of its content of a pain-killing, habit-forming drug should by the law be tolerated. “Relieved by the medicine those who take it read its label carefully, learn what has afforded the relief--it always is a mere relief, it never is a cure--and, unacquainted with the dangers attending substances of the sort, regularly dose themselves, either with increased quantities of the medicine or more probably with the straight drug. “A drug-tainted patent medicine is absolutely certain to establish a drug habit in any one who, for any length of time, takes it according to directions. “The proposed law makes such patent medicines, containing any quantity whatever of the habit-forming drugs, illegal. Physicians rarely if ever give prescriptions for them. The public will lose nothing and gain much through their abolishment. “Now let us consider the physician. “Physicians are at present permitted to prescribe and administer the habit-forming drugs as loosely and extravagantly as they please, either to themselves or others, without responsibility as to the outcome. Under the proposed law they are held responsible. “There is real necessity for the provision which disbars from medical practice physicians who take drugs. The drug-taking doctor is more dangerous than the drug-taking druggist or drug clerk. All are liable to irresponsibility at a time when it may well mean death to others; and, furthermore, all are promoters of the drug habit. The proposed law guards against them.