Druggists' Plaint

At its 50th annual convention at Atlantic City, the National Wholesale Druggists' Association adopted a report apropos of Prohibition:

"The industries depending on the use of alcohol have steadily declined, owing to the drastic and unjust methods employed by the prohibition office, while establishments engaged in the use of alcohol illegitimately have flourished by falsifying bonding warehouse records and, obtaining alcohol without tax, are flooding the market with preparations containing it at a price far below the standard at which legitimate concerns must sell.

"It is useless to expect that the manufacturer who needs alcohol for legitimate purposes can receive wise and conservative treatment from men whose business it is to chase criminals and who think only on this plane.

"The manufacturers of this country using alcohol are a unit in opposing the policies of the Prohibition Enforcement Division of the Treasury Department. There is absolutely nothing that they do of which we approve. They have been and are a rank failure in every way."

To this, Prohibition Commissioner Roy Asa Haynes replied caustically from Washington:

"There is no evidence whatever to sustain such a statement. On the other hand, there has been an expansion in the volume of legitimate alcohol-using industries and, in addition, there have been a number of new alcohol-using industries established during the past four years."

"The records of the Prohibition Unit show that no request of a legitimate wholesale druggist for alcohol supply during the past two years has been denied."

The Wholesale Druggists' Association also adopted a report condemning the Cramton Bill, passed by the House and now on the Senate calendar, which would take the Prohibition Unit out of the Internal Revenue Bureau and place it directly under the Secretary of the Treasury. They assert that it would hurt their industry if control of the industrial alcohol trade should be taken from the supervision of "the conservative internal revenue officers" and given entirely into the hands of "inexperienced prohibition agents whose time is largely given up to pursuing law ; violaters and who regard every user of alcohol as a potential bootlegger."