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Show THE PUBLIC IS PATENT MEDICINE MAD. Seventy-Five Millions of Dollars Will Be Spent I This Year for Quack Nostrums. : Mr. Samuel Hokpins Adams, writing on "The ; Great American Fraud'' in Collier's for October 7, says among other things: "Gullible America will spend this year some j seventy-five millions of dollars in the purchase of j patent medicines. In consideration of this sum ! it will swallow huge quantities of alcohol, an ap-1 palling amount of opiates and narcotics, a wide) assortment of varied drugs ranging from powerful! and dangerous heart depressants to insidious liver ! ' Stimulants; and, far in excess of alb other ingredi- ents. undiluted fr.iud. j "With a few honorable exceptions the. press of, the United States is at the beck and call of the patent medicines. Xot only do the newspapers modify news possibly affecting these interests, but they sometimes become their-active agents. F.- J. J Cheney, proprietor of Hall's Catarrh Cure, devised j some years ago a method of making the press do ! his fighting against legislation compelling makers , of remedies to publish their formula, or to print ! on the labels the dangerous drugs contained in the medicine a constantly recurring bugaboo of the! nostrum-dealer. This scheme he unfolded at ai meeting of the Proprietary Association of Amer- j ica, of which he is now president. He explained that he printed in red letters on every advertising contract a clause providing that 4 the contract should becomfe. void in the event of hostile legislation, legisla-tion, and he boasted -how he had used this as a club in a case where an Illinois legislator had, as he put it, attempted to hold him up for three hundred hun-dred dollars on a strike -bill. " I thought I had a plan better than this,' said Mr. Cheney to his associates, so I wrote to about forty papers and merely said: "Please look at your contract with me and take note that if this law passes you and I must stop doing ..business." The next week every one .of them had an article, and Mr. Man had to go.' . . ... ' . ' . . - - : "So emphatically did. this device recommend itself it-self to tlie assemblage that many, of the large firms took up the plan, and now the 'red clause' is a fam-1 ilia r device in the trade... j "A eut-rate store, the Economical Drug Conl-.J pany of Chicago, started upon a campaign and displayed a sign in the window reading: . r J : Please Do Not Ask Us - ' -? : . : Any Old " ' . - - : i : - - "What-Is Patent "Worth :-! ; ZUechcme : .i : For - you embarrass up.- as our lione:t answer : ..........- - ":" , T.-ur' S:i:'t'."'. IT TS ""OnTHLTJfc.5? : I ; Jf you mean to ask at what price we sell it, : ; that is an entirely different proposition. "When ': : sick, consult a sood 'physician. It is the -only : : proper course. And you Yrill find it cheaper in .: : the end than self-medication' with worthless : : 'patent' nostrum. . "V - - ' i: ': "This was followed up by the salesmen informing inform-ing all applicants for the prominent nostrums 'that they were wasting money. Yet with all this that store was unahle to get rid of-its patent, medicine trade, and today nostrums comprise one-third of its entire business. They comprise about two-thirds: of that of the average small store." - - ' j |