Patent Medications In The Twentieth Century

Unfortunately, even today with medications there is a risk of dependency and a chance that a person will become addicted to certain medications. Just the same in the 1900’s just when the promise of medical advances was happening, so was the concerns that individuals were becoming dependent on the drugs they were given. Consequently, two contributing factors caused a movement towards drug regulation in the twentieth century. First, was the abuse of patent medicines, and the second was the association of drug use with minority groups (Levinthal, 2012). Patent medicines are drugs that are not registered with any government or federal agency (Levinthal, 2012). Subsequently, these patent drugs kept their ingredients a secret because they were not required to list their ingredients on the package. Manufacturers could make claims that their medications were a …show more content…
Furthermore, some of these patent drugs contained a high amount of alcohol, opium, morphine, or cocaine, and were feasibly dangerous and addictive (Potter, 2014). With the popularity of these patent drugs grew drug abuse, however, in contrast to many of today’s drug abusers, the typical nineteenth-century abusers were white middle or upper-class women (Levinthal, 2012). Women were featured in advertisements for patent medicines to boost their sales, claiming to cure women for whatever