With regard to the proposed new Poisons Act one or two considerations should not be forgotten. There are hundreds of ways of taking life: the poisoner’s is only one. Even in his method the number of fatal agents he may use is almost unlimited. To make a schedule of certain poisons that are not to be sold without restriction, seems like prohibiting knives, while allowing stilettos—the latter are certainly less usual, but quite as fatal. Moreover, the Act of 1868 only affects one channel by which poisons may reach the public—viz., through the retail chemists. It secures a record of ordinary shop purchases, and thus facilitates the tracing of crime. But the channels of trade are still open: hundred-weights of arsenic are obtained, where ounces could not be purchased; and these large stocks are often carelessly kept, and left open to servants, workmen, or even children. The result is that the supposed restrictions on obtaining poisons are almost illusory: these substances are sown broadcast among ignorant people, and are placed in cupboards unlabelled among articles of food. The following are recent illustrations:—
“At Corkley, Wilts, the wife of a labourer used, instead of baking-powder, a packet of arsenic, intended by her husband as medicine for his horses. The husband and wife died.”—_Weekly Dispatch, May 6, 1883._
“At Whitchurch, a farmer was accused of poisoning a large number of cattle and other animals with arsenic. In 1881 he had obtained several pounds of it from Liverpool, stating that he wanted it to destroy vermin.”—_Evening Standard, June 2, 1883._
In the schedule of the 1868 Act, among the _less dangerous poisons_, to be obtained without restriction beyond proper labelling, appears, “Almonds, Essential Oil of (_unless deprived of prussic acid_).” Yet this preparation is one of the most perilous, as has been shown by numbers of deaths, and lately by the West Malling case (not yet ripe enough for reporting). There are also other faults in the schedule.
Remembering, then, that legislation on the sale of poisons is utterly unable to _prevent_ poisoning, that all it can do is to make the means a little difficult, and the detection more easy, how can we approve the proposal at this moment made, to tack on a few, very tentative clauses to an unsuccessful Act, and four more names to a very defective schedule? Why insert chloride of antimony, and omit nitrate of silver, sulphate of copper, and chloride of tin? The essence of a “poison” is _quantity_; and no Act which does not specify the maximum quantity that may be sold, can be effective. Beyond this, why should it be more criminal to _sell_ a dangerous substance to a poisoner than to _give_ it to him, or by culpable negligence to allow him to take possession of it? If such neglect were made punishable, if people who left arsenic, &c., about in cupboards without precaution, had to suffer for the consequences, we should hear less of such “accidents.”