ABSTRACT
Control of ‘dangerous drugs’ at a national and international level is essentially a 20th century phenomenon. Until then in Britain there had been, on the whole, a tolerant attitude to the use of opium, and later to morphine and cocaine when these drugs began to be produced in the second half of the 19th century. The Pharmacy Act 1868 was the first attempt to regulate the availability of drugs in Britain by making it unlawful for any person to sell or keep ‘open shop’ for retailing, dispensing or compounding poisons unless he was a pharmaceutical chemist, or to sell any poison unless the container was clearly labelled ‘poison’ with the name of the substance and the name and address of the seller. The League of Nations, of which the United States was not a member, was entrusted with the ‘general supervision of the traffic in opium and dangerous drugs’ as set out in the Hague Convention.
