ABSTRACT
These and other issues were what lay behind the transition to the second British System in the middle of the nineteenth century. This was the system of pharmaceutical regulation. Of course there were also other issues at stake. One – and a continuing theme in drug policy – was the question of professional status. Pharmacists were establishing a profession of pharmaceutical chemists at this time, based on the existing chemists and druggists and apothecaries, whose main concern was dispensing. Specialist status meant preventing unqualified people from selling drugs, and trying also to regulate the ways in which the general public controlled their own medication. Opium, as such a widely used commodity, naturally came into the story. The 1868 Pharmacy Act subjected opium to pharmaceutical control, but with minimal restrictions (after representations from pharmacists in the Fens, an area of particularly high sale, who did not want their trade destroyed). The Act specifically excluded patent medicines, many of which were opium based.
