The Story of Pharmacology in Under 1000 Words
In the beginning, anything could be a drug. Whether it was ground from a plant or found in an animal, it was ingested, applied, or injected by our ancestors. Eventually, scribes wrote things down to help remember what was beneficial (for use in the community) or poisonous (for use against an enemy). Priests became physicians, rituals became office calls, and hieroglyphics became prescriptions. Physicians lost the time to make their own medicines, so they turned the work over to apprentices who became pharmacists. Throughout the whole evolutionary process, everything worked just fine and everyone became healthier. Well, not exactly.
In the United States before 1906, if you wanted a drug and you had the money, you could just go out and buy it. Prescriptions were only a recommended option, and in some states, licensing any health professional was actively discouraged.
Patent medicines were loaded with morphine, cocaine, cannabis, or mercury compounds (so much so that archaeologists tracing the path of Lewis and Clark could identify fort locations by the levels of mercury still remaining in the explorers’ abandoned latrines).
Morphine was so widely used during the American Civil War that, after 1865, over 100,000 soldiers had some form of habituation or addiction to the narcotic.
The demand for drugs, licit and illicit, was sufficient enough for Sears to issue a separate drug catalogue at the start of the 20th century, essentially creating the first mail-order pharmacy.
In response to scandals of patient deaths and addictions, President Theodore Roosevelt encouraged the passage of the landmark Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. Considered a radical measure in its time, the act initially could only assure that ingredients and their amounts were listed on a patent medicine label (you could still get “arsenic tabules” for your complexion, but at least you knew it contained arsenic; this was considered a major breakthrough for consumer safety).
Plants served as the primary source for drugs. The term pharmacognosy, meaning “knowledge of drugs,” essentially meant the knowledge of plants.
Eventually, specific chemicals were discovered, isolated, or synthesized, and the sources for drugs began to shift from plants to the chemist’s bench. The idea was to create an inexhaustible supply of drugs. Being able to minimize unexpected responses came from carefully controlling the dose.
Even with the progression of the Food, Drug, and Insecticide Agency into the present-day FDA (its focus becoming foods and drugs), it still had little power to protect consumers. The fine against a Dr. James Peebles for selling “bitter almonds” (cyanide) as part of a treatment for epilepsy was a mere $5 in 1913.
It took further health disasters to prompt the creation of safety regulations. In 1937, deaths from a toxic solvent in the antibiotic sulfanilamide prompted a law requiring new drugs actually be shown safe before marketing (the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938). Serious birth defects in 1962 linked to thalidomide inspired the Kefauver-Harris amendments to assure that drugs were tested for safety and effectiveness before marketing.
Package inserts for patient information eventually appeared in 1970.
In between these laws came the Durham-Humphrey act, dividing drugs into the categories of non-prescription, prescription, and controlled substances:
Controlled substances were those drugs with the potential for addiction or abuse.
Non-prescription drugs became commonly known as over the counter drugs or OTCs.
The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) appeared in the early 1970s; and, with it, the establishment of controlled substance schedules or categories, ranked by the drug’s potential for abuse. These categories became schedules I (one) through V (five), and are still in use today:
Pharmacology Today in Under 300 Words
Modern pharmacology is a combined study of anything that can interact with living systems. It builds upon knowledge of physiology, chemistry, botany, biochemistry, and mathematical theorems. Even the study of pharmacognosy, after decades of being brushed aside as irrelevant, has reappeared with the increased interest in “herbal” or “natural” therapy...in some ways, we have not journeyed far from the explorers who traveled with Lewis and Clark in 1803.
