MEDICINE FAKES.

    Extraordinary Activities in the Underworld. Prevalent in India.

An extraordinary craze among the people of India for patent medicines has led to equally extraordinary ac- tivities in the underworld of the medi- cine market. Faked substitutes of all kinds are being discovered.

Cheap oil, for instance, has been sold as insulin, and tartaric acid mas- querades as fruit salts. Imitations of English face cream appear on the market at the rate of one every six weeks. There is an enormous trade in empty bottles. In Bombay there are numbers of unscrupulous chemists willing to buy bottles which bear the original labels, fill them up with some thing slightly resembling the original in appearance, and palm them off on up-country dealers. Bottles which have the maker's name and description of the contents moulded in the glass are keenly sought. Those which had contained a brand of lime-juice sell it sixpence each. The insulin fraud was discovered just in time to prevent serious conse- quences for a patient suffering from diabetes. A doctor was about to give an injection from a phial bearing an insulin label and the name of a lead- ing London firm. Not liking the look of the liquid, however, he refused to use it. On test it proved to be a com- mon oil. Practically every popular brand of medicine has it substitutes, either in its own or original packages or made up to look the same. Manufacturers of genuine products have an endless fight against their imitators, who are usually men without property and therefore difficult to sue in the courts. Apart from the Imitators inside In- dia there are hundreds of imitators outside who regularly try to put their fakes on the Indian market. The Customs museum at Bombay is full of specimens of their art.

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