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Author: Bicky October 1, The drug menace has caught hold of our community in its vice-like grip and if we do not wake up today, it may be too late tomorrow. It is since he joined this new school that the problem began. He met some bad influence and since then it has been the same. My parents and I tried everything. We personally talked to all his friends to leave him alone. Even he realises what kind of situation he is into. He wants to get out. I hope it gets fine. We are still in disbelief, but we have to live with it. It immediately reminded me of a poster that I had seen pasted on a wall as I was walking through an alley around a place in Darjeeling. The poster warned people against drug abuse in the neighbourhood and that if anyone was caught doing the same, they would be punished. I laughed a bit thinking that back in our time, the posters would warn people against throwing garbage, spitting or peeing. But at that moment, it hit me hard. I have been frequent to the talks of how the plague of drug abuse has unleashed itself in its worst form in the hills in the past few years. But now, it has become one of the biggest worries for us and our society. One much respected social worker from Mirik had also called me some weeks ago to discuss the same issue. He told me how recently a lot of parents from his neighbourhood were visiting him frequently complaining about how their children were getting into drug use. When he started investigating into the issue, he was shocked to find out that every other youth in the neighbourhood was exposed to drug use and there was at least one guy in every neighbourhood dealing in drugs. It is not about just some youths getting into drugs. As many reasons as there may be for the drugs to be flowing through all the veins and arteries of our hills, I try to decode few. Though no parents would want their children to fall into the trap of drugs, they, however, end up playing some role in it. In these times, the abundance of money and lack of time for a considerable section of the people has changed to a large extent changed the structure of parenthood for many. It is often wrongly thought that providing their children with enough money or even more than that is going to keep them happy and thus solve all the problems, not even thinking or asking where the crazy amount of money is being spent and how. For teenagers, it has these days become a normal routine to travel down somewhere with friends in a car, spend the weekend there, have fun and return back. The excess amount of money, mixed with teenage confusion encourages them to experiment and henceforward. Only if we realise that time and care can do more of a wonder than money ever can. The cheap drugs smuggled from Nepal have gained a widespread market in Siliguri, from where they are supplied to different areas. From Siliguri, the drugs can easily be transported to Darjeeling and then sold. Young people who are themselves into drugs have adopted this business of dealing with drugs along with different parts of the hills, which ensures the regular availability of drugs and easy money in huge amounts, just against a certain amount of risk. As such, every part in Darjeeling surely has someone or the other dealing in drugs. The rapidly growing commercialisation of education and the profit-driven nature of the private schools are proving to be hitting us at places that hurt us the most. Some of the times, in the endeavour to sustain their flow of income, they end up overlooking the problematic attitudes of certain students or let them escape with normal suspensions or punishment, knowing very well that the same students could draw many other good students into unwanted habits. Today, no one can argue on the fact that major portion of the youngest lot drug abusers belongs to the big and elite private schools. Many a time, it is heard that the Police authorities are well versed with the supply chain of the drugs in the hills. But still, a very casual approach is adopted in dealing with the issue and the allied culprits. Even if the culprits are caught, it is alleged by many that they get away with it very easily. While we are often proud of the fashion sense among our youths in the hills, at the same time, we also need to invest some thought on the supposed cool culture that has gained a lot of grounds. Today, unlike most of the places, the major concern among our youths is to look cool and seem cool. This culture slowly many times also introduces them to drugs and they get into it just for the sake of their company, the culture and the age curiosity. The schools should look to educate the students about drug abuse and thus spread awareness on a regular basis. With no work at disposal, youths often tend to get into drug abuse or drug dealing. Also, absence of quality institutions for higher education fails to establish the environment of thought, dissent, consciousness and intellect in the hills. While the use of drugs may be specific to individual people, the effects of it is definitely to be borne by the entire society, more by the family of those individuals. By that time, we may have lost an entire generation and we may be struggling to save the coming ones. The Faces In Our Midst. Bicky , Columns. Vimal Khawas , Popular Articles. Divya Pradhan. Home Columns Bicky. Powered by Inline Related Posts. Be the first to comment on 'The Drug Menace'. Leave a comment Cancel reply Your email address will not be published.

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Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4. This article analyzes why adulteration became a key trope of the Indian drug market. Adulteration had a pervasive presence, being present in medical discourses, public opinion and debate, and the nationalist claim for government intervention. The article first situates the roots of adulteration in the composite nature of this market, which involved the availability of drugs of different potencies as well as the presence of multiple layers of manufacturers, agents, and distributors. It then shows that such a market witnessed the availability of drugs of diverse potency and strengths, which were understood as elements of adulteration in contemporary medical and official discourse. Although contemporary critics argued that the lack of government legislation and control allowed adulteration to sustain itself, this article establishes that the culture of the dispensation of drugs in India necessarily involved a multitude of manufacturer—retailers, bazaar traders, and medical professionals practicing a range of therapies. Keywords: drugs trade, Ayurveda, bazaar medicine, adulteration, colonial India, medical market, Drugs Enquiry Committee, indigenous drugs. At the turn of the nineteenth century colonial India was awash with patent and proprietary medicines, tinctures, tonics, powders, and tabloids of every description. Many were imported from Great Britain or the United States; a substantial number also arrived from Germany, France, Italy, and the fast-industrializing Japan. These were sold by British Indian agents in India, who also traded in compounds and galenicals that they manufactured themselves. They competed with Indian druggists, who were large-scale importers and also did extensive business with fledgling Indian firms in the early twentieth century. Therapeutic and cosmetic products of varying standards and efficacy were sold directly to consumers by small merchants, itinerant traders, and Ayurvedic and Hakimi practitioners as well. This article argues that the prevailing distinctions drawn between indigenous and Western drugs in colonial India are misleading. These distinctions are premised on an understanding of cultural nationalism. They do not take into account the heterogeneous nature of the trade, manufacture, and consumption patterns in the market. An understanding of this composite nature of the drug market provides a unique entry point to the question of adulteration of drugs within that market. The heterogeneity of the market did not only involve the availability and diversity of drugs or the multiple layers of agents and distributors involved in that trade, although these were characteristic of that market. This market witnessed the availability of drugs of diverse potency and strengths, sometimes one single drug sold in several degrees of potency. This was as true of Ayurvedic and Hakimi medicines as of Western therapeutic products. For the latter, there was always British Pharmacopeia BP as the standard of reference, but neither the importers not local manufacturers were restricted by its recommendations. Adulteration of drugs in this market has been almost entirely ignored by historians, except with reference to the distribution of quinine. The problems of adulteration in quinine or cinchona cannot be seen in isolation to the entirety of the political and cultural complexities that defined the drug market in colonial India. This article explores the story of heterogeneity and adulteration in the emergent Indian drug market. It argues that the discourse of adulteration in drug production and marketing in India was informed by uniquely Indian realities, such as the share of the indigenous drugs in the market, economic nationalism swadeshi , the elusive allure of import substitution, and a plurality of medical traditions and practices. The problem of adulteration of drugs in India is wider than that of a lack of government regulation. This article explains how the drug market in colonial India was formed and why it remained largely uncontrolled in spite of state or nationalist intervention. Historians of medicine have examined the histories of the pharmaceutical industries in Europe and North America, focusing on industrialization, collaborations between the industry and medical schools, and new marketing strategies in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the United States, collaborations between universities and corporations helped in the manufacture of new drugs. Although scholarship in Indian history of medicine has explored how colonialism changed institutions and praxis of medicine in India, there is relatively scant attention to a history of the production and the delivery of drugs. Recent histories on drugs in India have focused on Ayurvedic and Unani therapy: their marketing, standardization, and tangled relationship with the British Indian medical establishment and with Indian nationalism. This provided the political context of the consolidation of the corporate identities of Ayurvedic and Unani practitioners and informed new marketing strategies, transforming traditional drugs into modern Ayurveda or Unani therapeutics. Ayurvedas and Hakims used the print media in major Indian languages of Punjabi, Hindi, and Urdu to sustain the discourse of the Indian body, with nationalist political movements in order to build the edifice for a legitimate, collective identity for themselves. Prior researchers have focused on Indian practitioners and the modernizing of indigenous drugs centered on the trope of indigenous medical cultures in consonance with Indian nationalism in various forms. Sivaramakrishnan, Berger, and Madhuri Sharma have specifically demonstrated that indigenous medical theory and praxis, particularly that of Ayurveda, were constructed through the public sphere in Punjabi and Hindi in northern India. Their scholarship has provided a counterfoil to the focus by historians on the loss of institutional support and legitimacy of the indigenous medical systems in British India. To move from discourse to praxis, international trade in drugs and therapeutic products had burgeoned in the eighteenth century, commensurably with the volume of trade itself. This essay asks some questions: Did nationalist and institutional consolidations change the content of medicines and therapeutic substances sold in colonial India? How were they distributed and marketed? Was the widespread adulteration of the market the consequence of its heterogeneity? To what extent did the involvement of government-sponsored medical establishments that bought therapeutic products from the market influence the drug market? The drugs and therapeutics trade in India was a complex one and occurred at multiple levels. These processes of production, marketing and dispensing of Indian drugs were conducted in an intensely competitive, dynamic, and diverse market. The polarities of indigenous and Western therapeutic products were a construct of this market. Instead, the production and consumption of drugs and other therapeutic products in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India were ideologically flexible and commercially vibrant. An international, heterogeneous therapeutic culture placed India within this trade; and this transnational commerce encompassed and included regional therapeutic vernaculars, both in medical print and therapeutic products. This market was made mostly in Indian cities. And although the fear of adulteration was pervasive, it was not a construct of the heterogeneity of the market but an inalienable part of the making of the market itself. The drug market was formed through the interplay of three institutions: the colonial state, the emergence of the Indian middle class, and the drugs trade. These defined the heterogeneity of the market and led to various degrees of adulteration in the drug market. The principal cities in colonial India were populated by a large middle class by the second half of the nineteenth century. These included the Presidency capitals of Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras as well as large provincial towns such as Delhi, Benares, Allahabad, Lahore, Patna, Bangalore, Poona, and Ahmedabad and the hill stations where most of British Indian officialdom lived and worked for more than half the year—Simla, Darjeeling, and Ootacamund. A lively urban culture developed here; the cities and towns of British India were the locations of the successes of the colonial economy and polity, of populations of British, Anglo-Indian, and educated Indians as well as migrant laborers, traders, and small and large manufacturers. Many Indians benefited from the colonial experiments in institution building; universities and colleges, medical schools, hospitals, municipal government and local politics, and a print culture all originated and took root in the colonial cities; these in turn informed the emergent public sphere in urban colonial India. As historians have pointed out, although the making of a modern middle class in India was a fragmented and ambivalent process, a middle-class identity was nonetheless self-fashioned through a pursuit, in many forms, of modernity. While the Indian middle class had emerged from the early nineteenth-century colonial establishments, the drug market in turn had developed from eighteenth-century encounters between the commerce of the East India Company EIC and indigenous trade. The drug market and middle-class engagement with medicine political and therapeutic were mutually constitutive. The two had distinctive roots. In eighteenth-century India, both Western and indigenous medicines depended on herbs and their extracts, minerals, and animal matter. Later, these supplemented the total quantity of drugs used by government medical institutions. Within this wide spectrum were the importers, traders, and manufacturers of indigenous and allopathic remedies and retailers and distributors who participated in the vast subcontinental drug market. The difference between indigenous drugs and Western ones occurred mostly in the processing stage. In the nineteenth century, the hospitals and charitable dispensaries that were supported by the colonial state predominantly used drugs procured from England. At this time, Britain imported a huge amount of bulk drugs from India; these were then processed and re-exported at much higher prices. A large proportion of drugs were bought by the Indian army in India for the use of its troops in their hospitals. The army also extensively purchased from abroad all kinds of pharmaceutical preparations and proprietary medicines. Since the expansion of the hospital system in colonial India was first undertaken and then overseen by military administration, the supply of medicines to them was undertaken by the medical department of the government. The government was both manufacturer as well as supplier of medicine to the government-aided hospitals and dispensaries. Although it processed some local drugs in its factories, in the late nineteenth century the MSDs preferred to patronize firms from England. Large manufacturing firms in England had their agents in Bombay or Calcutta who negotiated contracts with government on their behalf. This was the cause of great resentment on the part of Indian manufacturers and importers. The private market flourished outside of government-aided institutions. In the early twentieth century, urban areas in British India became the sites of competition for the distribution and sale of numerous medicines imported from Britain, Germany, the United States, and even Japan. This also facilitated the entry and presence of several pharmaceutical multinational companies MNCs , and the Indian market became a lucrative area for foreign companies. The consumer market in pharmaceutical products refers not only to drugs, but also to aerated water, hair oil, creams and ointments, toothpaste, aphrodisiacs, and innumerable tonics. In the late nineteenth century, the bulk of the drugs were sold by British or European importers. They were based in the colonial metropolises of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras and catered mostly to the European white clientele both in the cities and in the hill stations, district headquarters, industrial enclaves, and commercial hubs where the British population of India resided. Smith and Sons Madras. These firms sold at retail; but this was only part of their widespread business concerns. They also procured and sold wholesale drugs for large British-owned companies in India, including several rail and tea companies and collieries that dispensed basic drugs such as compounds of cinchona on a large scale to their workers, or to the native states that built therapeutic institutions for the public, such as in Baroda, Travancore, and Hyderabad. Imports included umbrellas, cutlery, photographic equipment, perfumes, cosmetics, sewing machines and gramophones, preserved fruits, medicated wines, brandies and spirits, tobacco, canned meats, cocoa, chocolate, and, invariably, bottles of patent medicines, powders, and medicine chests. Although BP was the standard-bearer for drug sales in India, there was no legislation to enforce its preeminent position. In the absence of either a food and drugs law or a self-governing body of pharmacists, the quality of the goods varied; therefore, each prominent retail store depended on its own name brand for marketing. In many cantonment towns and hill stations, these stores were part of the commercial landscape. The Bombay-based Treacher and Company had achieved a virtual monopoly over European pharmaceutical products in Poona, a cantonment town near Bombay. A guidebook for visitors to Poona pointed out that the street where their outlet was located was known informally as Treacher Road. The British Indian traders in Bombay, Madras, Rangoon, and Calcutta engaged directly with suppliers from Britain as well as their agents. One prominent agent, Mr. Charles W. White, for instance, represented Burgoyne, Burbidges and Company, A. Pears, as well as Wellcome Burroughs and Company in India. While he was a larger-than-life figure, well known to all British and several Indian wholesalers, he was only one of several. They marketed through advertisements in newspapers and periodicals in English, evangelical periodicals, regional-language newspapers, and medical journals. The distributors also directly canvassed medical professionals, both official and unofficial. The need for advertising and canvassing seems evident because of competition from Indian distributors and importers. In spite of their reputation, the BP standard was not necessarily maintained by all British distributors because the market remained unregulated. There are no reliable records for the total amount of manufacture and trading in drugs and pharmaceuticals in British India at this time. In addition to the luxurious displays in the Europeanized commercial streets of British India, there also lurked a large bazaar market, catered to by Indian distributors and wholesalers. Historians of the marketplace in India have pointed out that the bazaar was far from a quintessentially exotic marketplace and therefore subordinate to the European capitalist market. Indian importers and wholesalers often preferred to patronize German, Japanese, and American manufacturers and undercut the prices of the more prominent and visible British manufacturers and their agents and distributors in India. The drug-trade is changing … the strictly English pharmacies do not multiply, as they are needed solely by the white people and richer natives. The bulk of the people get their medicines from the bazaar druggists, who are becoming more numerous. They are keen buyers, because they are the keenest sellers in the world. The bazaar traders catered to the large numbers of middle- and lower-class urban Indians. They encompassed the occupational descendant of the spice merchant who provided bazaar medicine to the large-scale importers and distributors of European pharmaceutical products. Despite competition and racialized interactions, the bazaar traders negotiated and partnered with the more prestigious British Indian importers. The agent and proprietors of B. Abdul Gunny and Company, of Calcutta. Their agent sent stern warnings to cease the practice; but in a diverse market, even the British Indian distributors moved beyond their European niches to participate in the bazaar trade in pharmaceutical goods. The Indian distributors proved more flexible than the large British pharmacies and resorted to importing from Germany, the United States, and Japan at cheaper rates for similar products. The flourishing market lent impetus to the increasingly large proportion of the non-British share of the Indian medical market in the twentieth century. Indian drug sellers began to manufacture their own products, including patent and proprietary medicines, especially the ubiquitous fever, cholera, and dysentery pills. One of the largest firms in India, B. Paul of Calcutta, was both importer and producer of medicines; it began as a small family firm and by employed around three hundred assistants in retail outlets in Calcutta alone Figure 3. For a time before World War I B. After the expansion of the company during World War I, it employed over fifteen hundred workers. Paul, led the first short-lived professional body of pharmacists, the Calcutta Chemists and Druggists Association, which lobbied for favorable exchange rates from British banks in Calcutta. In the process, the firm and its owner, Butto Kristo, have been understood as representing a crystallization of a new kind of drugs trader, marginalizing the older, subaltern herb collectors and gatherers who have remained nameless in Bengali nationalist iconography. First, the loyalty of the Bengali middle class toward indigenous drugs was ambivalent. They were often biased in favor of foreign-produced drugs. Second, B. Paul continued an older tradition of family firms that dealt in wholesale markets—except that the challenges were new. The dominating presence of Anglo-Indian manufacturers and distributors lent a racial edge to the competition. Butto Kristo was not an educated pharmacist in the Western medical tradition. Other large Indian bazaar traders flourished as well, especially in Bombay, where indigenous capital had a freer rein than it did in eastern India. Powell and Company was established around by an Indian, A. His company traded in imported pharmaceuticals and surgical instruments and manufactured surgical instruments. In , he was the only non-European importer and distributer who exhibited his products at the exhibition of the Bombay Medical Union; by this time his company was the Indian agent of several exporters too. Powell and Company led an informal association of Bombay chemists and druggists, especially lobbying on behalf of the Indian merchants. Paul and N. Powell need to be seen as components of a new structure of drug markets in the early twentieth century. Meanwhile, rising nationalist aspirations from the late nineteenth century highlighted the economic exploitation of the colonial state. With large-scale protests at the partition of Bengal in , the swadeshi movement led a boycott of foreign goods and supported indigenous manufacturing. Between and , several Indian chemical and pharmaceutical companies emerged; these were distinct from the druggists-cum-manufacturers. They were established by chemists who were trained in scientific techniques and interested in setting up laboratories that would manufacture pharmaceuticals to compete directly with imported pharmaceuticals. Two prominent scientists—P. Gajjar, also a chemistry teacher—partnered with B. In , Alembic moved its factory to Baroda, a princely state in western India. The generous patronage of the modernist ruler of Baroda, Maharaja Sir Sayajirao III, enabled them to set up a large factory, and their specialty was the production of alcoholic tinctures, fruit essences, and perfumery. In fact, emergent Indian pharmaceutical companies competed for the same market and manufactured both Western and Ayurvedic medicines. Some of them did not retail their products but instead concentrated on distribution of their goods wholesale to all of India. They also took the opportunity to display their products at industrial exhibitions in India, especially once the swadeshi movement for economic nationalism gained in momentum. As Lisa Trivedi has argued, the exhibitions served to delineate the geography and the culture of the aspiring nation. The Indian National Congress organized the first Indian Industrial and Agricultural Exhibition in in Calcutta, and in succeeding years to Ahmedabad, Bombay, Madras, and Benares, all intensely urban manufacturing or trading centers. By the time it came around again to Calcutta in —7, it attracted manufacturers from all over India and included about a thousand exhibitors. Paul won awards for the best quality products in therapeutic goods. Ray and T. Powell, who were distributors as well as manufacturers, definitely fell into that category. The nationalist activism of Ray and Gajjar has served to highlight their importance in Indian industrialism in nationalist discourse. Historians have also argued that they both were pioneers particularly Ray, a nationalist of the pharmaceutical industry in British India. There was a continuum, therefore, from the so-called bazaar dealers to the scientifically trained manufacturers that involved importers, distributers, and producers. The critical element of this market was not the heterogeneity of its sellers, although that was relevant, but that a single drug could be imported or processed, distributed, and consumed in many different forms, potencies, and prices, very seldom in conformity with BP. The most obvious example of this is the trade in quinine and its alkaloids—these were sold in several potencies and differing prices across the country. One reason for widespread adulteration was that government regulation was light. There was no food and drugs law in colonial India; laws regulating the sale of poisons and narcotics like cocaine evolved piecemeal. In Bengal all pharmacists selling British pharmaceuticals containing any form of poison had to be registered, but this law hardly precluded hundreds of sellers from trading in the informal market. In Bombay, a similar act could be enforced only on the pharmacies in the metropolis, and then only the larger ones. Among the elite medical officials of the Indian Medical Service, there were discussions on limited regulation of the drug market. These continued until the interwar years, when public pressure fueled by Indian newspapers and lobbying by the most prominent British and Indian manufacturers succeeded in the appointment of a drug standardization committee by the government in Effectively, there was no control over the drug market in late colonial India. In official discourse, the preexistence of a large, informal market in variable drugs were supposed to have prevented any legislation to control it. They pointed out that the chemical examiners at Calcutta and Madras particularly had found hundreds of deaths by poisoning and urged the need for legal control. These varied enormously and were a rich source of contention between competing European importers as well as among Indian dealers. The bulk of the blame for the preponderance of substandard products fell on the bazaar traders, from the large wholesale importer to the modest pavement drug seller. The adulterated market was vast; it included imitations of well-known imported branded products like soaps, powders, and patent medicines as well as bulk products like olive and almond oils. In , Charles W. White, the British agent for B. In , an impassioned appeal by the Parsi physician Dosabhai Rastamji Bardi, who taught at the Grant Medical College in Bombay, demonstrated the extent of the adulteration in food and drugs. Citing records of the Chemical Examiners of Bombay from to , Bardi claimed that there was consistent adulteration of imports to the Indian market:. It is necessary to remember that the retail druggist hardly adulterates them, but as people want cheap drugs, he buys adulterated articles … no wonder that medical men are disappointed in their treatment. Bombay, and for the matter … the whole of India, depends on European and American markets for their supply of drugs, at any rate of all important pharmaceutical and chemical preparations. Colonial historians have not engaged with the problem of adulteration in the Indian drug market. Contemporary analysis of the Indian drug market was one of adulteration and the lack of drug control; in both official and medical discourse, adulteration was linked largely to the bazaar market, Indian manufacturers of both Western and Indian medicine, and unscrupulous importers who dealt with products from the Continent. The official and medical rhetoric suggested that the respectable end of the market was dominated by British Indian manufacturers and importers. The professionalization of pharmacy is also the predominant theme of analyzing the history of the drug industry in developed Western nations. What is omitted from the analysis of adulteration by contemporary commentators and indeed the rare historian such as Barton has addressed it with reference to quinine is the need for drugs of varying prices to suit the different sections of consumers within the Indian market. This led to drugs of different strengths and potencies, often in disguised form, because these differing potencies were not recognized by BP. The case was even more complicated by the widespread use of indigenous drugs, which could not be standardized according to BP because Western medical professionals suggested that their active principles should first be analyzed, a gigantic and impossible task. Adulteration therefore covered a spectrum of deficiencies among the drugs sold in the market; some were willfully and totally fake medicines, others were simply drugs of a lower potency and price. Examples of adulteration in imports found by the chemical examiner of Bombay included the presence of hydrochlorate of cinchonin, a much cheaper product, in a sample of quinine sulphate, potassium nitrate containing hydrochloric acid, worm tablets with no santonin, and a sample of tartar emetic not conforming to BP tests. Adulteration and substandard goods was pervasive; the diversity and quantity of the therapeutic products on sale in India appeared to defy any serious attempt at regulation. The fifty-four drugs added to BP in acknowledgment of indigenous drugs that could be prescribed by Western practitioners in India made little difference to the production or sale of indigenous drugs instead of imported ones; and indeed, the major thrust of import substitution and production of indigenous drugs began only when World War I severely circumscribed the import trade in the Indian drug market. In this market, therefore, manufacturers and distributers relied heavily on branding and advertising. All major drug companies, both British-and Indian-owned, warned against imitations and substitutions cleverly produced to fool customers into buying substandard goods. What then defined purity to the customer? The pricing provided a guidance of sorts: expensive products were considered more efficacious. Even this standard was subverted on a regular basis with the production of imitation drugs sold in reused packaging from reputable manufacturers, who responded by printing warnings against imitation products in advertisements and circulars. The only drug that the government attempted to distribute widely in India was quinine and its alkaloids, at first distributed free, and then sold at a nominal price. Through inexpensive packets sold at post offices and later through a wide-ranging network of distributors, provincial governments sought to limit the devastation caused by malaria. As Patricia Barton has demonstrated, the high levels of adulteration up to 80 percent of the quinine tablets sold by government agents and other distributors subverted the policy. Meanwhile, Indian druggists faced most of the blame for adulteration and substandard products in the market. These might include imported patent medicines as well as drugs commonly used in both indigenous and Western systems of medicine, including belladonna, aconite, senna, and asafetida. Before World War I, public discourse in India recognized that some kind of legislation was needed, and in the Upper Provinces one Indian councilor referred a request for legislation to the Select Committee in In the age of nationalism, Indian medical professionals often tended to view adulteration at two levels: the failure of self-regulation by the merchants and industrialists and the lack of a professionalization by pharmacists. The Indian Medical Record argued for cooperative associations and suggested the establishment of an apprentice system to train prospective pharmacists. The popular movement for a drug control policy continued in the Indian press, both national and regional. In the interwar years it proved a nationalist issue. The Indian press, in a time of intense competition between Indian and British capital in manufacturing and trade, inverted the charge of adulteration and pointed out that British manufacturers and British importers in India colluded to release substandard pharmaceutical products in the Indian market. In , an article in the daily the Bengalee , reproduced by the Indian Medical Record , alleged that all reputed pharmaceutical companies in Calcutta, both British-owned and Indian, made a regular practice of misleading customers by labeling their products as being of BP strength, including BCPW, Stanistreet, Smith and Company, D. Waldie and Company, and B. Paul distributors of imported products as well as manufacturers. This was particularly aggravated in the immediate postwar era, when British, German, and American companies dumped excess World War I stocks on the Indian market on a large scale. In the interwar years, therefore, while most problems of adulteration remained familiar, they acquired a new urgency in public discourse. Why was adulteration so pervasive and impossible to contain? One may argue that the market itself settled for differing degrees of potency, sold at correspondingly different rates to suit the pockets of consumers. But the medical market like any other in colonial India in effect was not laissez-faire. The MSDs bought a large quantity of medical products from the United Kingdom and manufactured several drugs in their factories. The Indian army and on a lesser priority the government hospitals, therefore, were provided with a quality of drugs that usually conformed to the BP standard. Until World War I, therefore, the government of India showed little interest in controlling the private market in drugs and remained indifferent to public opinion or nationalist pressure for a drug control law. World War I changed government priorities. During the war the Indian army was deployed to several places, such as Mesopotamia, where imports from Europe proved difficult and those from Germany ceased altogether. Several Indian manufacturers, particularly the large producer—retailers, made a fortune in supplying government contracts. Nonetheless, during the war, the Indian army could no longer remain insulated from the variations in potency of medicine and surgical products that pervaded the private market. There was one prosecution; the Royal Army Medical Corps put Phillips and Company of Bombay on a perpetual blacklist after investigations revealed that it had supplied highly adulterated and substandard medicine and surgical dressings during the war. It was not only that the Indian army had been endangered on the field. Most government hospitals and lesser charitable institutions and private hospitals faced an acute shortage of medicines in the latter years of the war. The clamor for an independence from imports, however qualified, resonated even among British medical professionals of the IMS. Here the Indian nationalists were joined by others motivated by a huge scarcity of medicines. The urgency in public discourse reflected that within the medical profession itself. Their concern encompassed three related themes: the prevention of adulteration of drugs both generic and proprietary; professional training for chemists; and an impetus, particularly by Indian medical professionals trained in Western medicine as much as by Ayurvedas and Hakims, to classify, process, and use Indian substitutes of Western imported products as much as possible. The huge range of indigenous drugs and the local manufacture of drugs came to official and medical notice; but public discourse and medical disquiet on the lack of regulation in the market grew in the immediate postwar period. Indigenous drugs were therefore both sought-after and the objects of suspicion. Although the demands for import substitution of drugs from the indigenous pharmacopeia continued to inform government policy, once the desperate urgency of scarcity was over with the war, there was little conviction in any government initiative to introduce import substitution through encouraging supplies from Indian manufacturers to the MSDs. The results were fragmentary at best. After World War I, British, American, and even German imports resumed and the short-lived government emphasis on import substitution dwindled. Large-scale nationalist pressure and a push toward import substitution led to some concessions for Indian industry after the war. These did not extend to the pharmaceutical industry, however. The MSDs continued to control all supplies to government hospitals and imported drugs manufactured abroad. Government hospital administrations often resented the loss of independence and the red tape involved in their sourcing exclusively from the MSDs. In , the surgeon-general of the government of Bombay surrendered to pressure from government hospitals to purchase their own medicines through inviting tenders. Several British, British Indian, and bazaar companies supplied to the hospitals, but this system was discontinued because the surgeon-general ruled that the method was liable to fraud. This left the private markets vulnerable to spurious drugs, proprietary medicines that survived on aggressive and false advertisement, and adulteration at different levels of manufacture and distribution. As we have seen, the problem of adulteration had aroused public opinion in the early twentieth century. It became prominent in nationalist discourse during and after the war, when Indian companies alleged that foreign companies were dumping substandard goods in the Indian market. Nationalists intervened to demand legislation. In the interwar period, when the League of Nations initiated international cooperation on both the control of narcotic drugs and the standardization of sera and vaccines, the government capitulated to the general clamor at home as well as to the new international initiatives and instituted the Drugs Enquiry Committee DEC in It was chaired by R. Chopra, who had extensively researched the properties of indigenous drugs at the Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine. The DEC, which consulted the nascent industry, retailers, and medical professionals, made several recommendations to regulate the import, sale, and manufacture of pharmaceutical products in the country and to streamline the training of pharmacists in technical institutes in its report in The government acted on the bulk of these recommendations only when it passed the Drug Act in Barton has argued that the transfer of the responsibility for health to provincial governments which, after devolution of power in , was ruled by nationalist governments made an all-India policy impossible for the colonial government in Delhi. The culture of the dispensation of drugs in India necessarily involved manufacturer—retailers, bazaar traders, and a multitude of medical professionals practicing a range of therapies, allopathic, homeopathic, or Ayurveda or Unani, who also sold their own potions and pills to their patients. While the Western therapeutic products could be theoretically held to the BP standards, Western medical practitioners, British and Indian alike, insisted that indigenous drugs could not be standardized because their active principles had not been isolated. Many nationalist Western-educated medical professionals campaigned for an Indian Pharmacopeia, which would include the hundreds of drugs, they insisted, that were available in India and were being exported for processing abroad. Like drug control legislation, an Indian Pharmacopeia also therefore became a nationalist political demand after World War I. The demands for import substitution of drugs from the indigenous pharmacopeia continued to inform government policy, albeit in altogether a too lackadaisical manner to invoke any conviction in the policy among consumers. An indigenous drugs manufacture committee was formed in , and it diligently reported on the progress on manufacture to facilitate import substitution until The imported medicines suffered from no such lack of scientific authority as the Indian substitutes. When adulteration became a fiercely contested issue between the British Indian distributors and the Indian manufacturers, it affected the import trade on two counts. The first was a general, nationalist push for the consumption of swadeshi goods. Second, the discourse of the distinctiveness of the tropics as a unique disease environment that defined tropical medicine permeated in the popular and even medical imagination. This led to the idea that only therapeutics manufactured in India were suitable for Indian bodies and the Indian climate. For instance, Dr. While the government research institutes continued to produce sera and vaccines on a large scale with a focus on their standardization, there was no such control over the quality of drugs for sale in the open market. Adulteration and its elusive counterpart purity remained contested sites in the medical market in colonial India. I wish to thank the Wellcome Trust, which funded the research for this article. Her current research is on the histories of the Indian pharmaceutical industry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Barton Patricia. Alcohol Drugs. Davenport-Hines R. Glaxo: A History to Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Liebenau Jonathan. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press; Quirke V. New York: Routledge; Robson Michael. The French Pharmaceutical Industry, — In: Higby Gregory J. Madison: American Institute of the History of Pharmacy; Church Roy, Tansey E. Lancaster: Crucible; Slinn Judy. Drugs and Narcotics in History. Sivaramakrishnan Kavita. 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London: J. Churchill; Report on the Proceedings of the Drugs Manufacture Committee. Simla: Government Central Press; National Archives of India n. Food and Drugs. Ghosal Lal Mohan. Turner Ardeshir K. Analysis of Bombay Bazar \[sic\] Vegetables. Basu Narendra Nath. Analysis of Jack Fruit Seeds. As a library, NLM provides access to scientific literature. Bull Hist Med. Open in a new tab. Old Potions, New Bottles. Indigenous and Western Medicine. Everyday Technology. Nationalizing the Body. Drugs in India. Indian and Eastern Chemist. Similar articles. Add to Collections. Create a new collection. Add to an existing collection. Choose a collection Unable to load your collection due to an error Please try again. Add Cancel.

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