Dallas Morning News
June 10, 1897
Page: 2


The Druggist's License

In Local Option Districts, It is Argued, 
  Will Prove a Boomerang, 
      as It Is Too High

  Wortham, Freestone Co., Tex., June 8 - The bill recently passed by our 
legislature requiring druggists in local option towns who sell liquors on 
prescriptions to pay a license, which became a law without the governor's
approval and which goes into effect on the 21st of August next, will be of
interest to the people living in local option towns and districts throughout
the state.
  This law imposes an occupation tax of $200 and requires a liquor dealer's 
bond of $2500.  This $200 state tax may be supplemented by the commissioners'
court with a county tax of $100, and if in an incorporated town $100 city tax,
which with the federal tax of $25 would make $425.
  To comply with the druggist's bond and have his prescription duly honor and
filled the physician must be a regular practicing physician; he must address his
prescription to the druggist, must write it with ink on white paper in his own 
hand-writing, date, number and sign it, giving the physician's and patient's 
place of residence and certify on his honor that he has in person carefully 
examined the patient and that he finds him actually sick, giving the disease as
near as he can, and that the patient is in immediate need of an alcoholic 
stimulant such as prescribed.  The prescription can not be filled if presented
later than three days from when it was written.
  L. D. Lillard, member of the house from Freestone, in a private letter says 
of the law:
  "The intention of the bill by fixing a tax and requiring bond is to drive out
blind tigers from local option towns and make it so that one reputable, 
responsible house in a place would be able to make the bond and pay the license
and sell according to law.  It is believed by the friends of the bill that the
new law will do this, though experience may rove that they put the license too
high.  It is to be hoped, however, that in very many if not in all local option
districts one substantial person will be found who will make bond, pay the tax
and run the business according to the law, and by so doing cause all the blind 
tigers to go out of business."
  It is to be feared that nothing by a blind tiger, and a good healthy one at
that will be able to do business under this law.  The advocates of the measure 
evidently labored under a mistake as to the quantity of liquors prescribed in
regular practice.  They did not seem to know that in a great many of the most
common diseases stimulants are contra-indicated and never prescribed.  A 
physician may do weeks of active practice without having occasion to write a 
prescription of this kind.  When stimulants are prescribed at all it is usually
in small quantity, and seldom more than one prescription is written for the 
same patient.  On this account the liquor sales of an honest druggist who runs
his business according to the law is a very small item of his trade and will not
justify his paying such a license.
  Take the town of Wortham as an example.  Here there are three drug stores, only 
one of them selling spirituous liquors.  The tax would be $325.  This store has 
the patronage of the four local physicians ad occasionally fills prescriptions 
from Cade, Bonner and Tehuacana, three neighboring towns, in which liquors are
not sold.  From the 1st of November last to the 1st of June, a period of seven 
months, there were filled at this store 1674 prescriptions, of which 119 were 
for liquors, amounting to $73.45.  This amounts to about $10.50 a month or $126 
a year.  It will be seen at once that this drug store can not afford to continue
in the liquor business after the new law goes into effect.  Doubtless nearly 
every town in the state where prohibition is in effect will be in the same fix.
Instead of a protection to the druggist, which its authors intended it to be, 
the law will be a benefit only to the saloons.  It will turn all the trade of 
local option towns into the nearest saloons, a thing far from the intension of
the makers of the law.
                               W. ALLEGRE