Code of Ethics, 1886

Preamble

The members of the Dakota Pharmaceutical Association considering it necessary that some mutual understanding should exist in regard to the moral principles guiding them in their profession, hereby agree upon the following code of ethics:

1. We accept the United States Pharmacopoeia as our standard and guide for all official preparations, and recognize a variance from its rules only in exceptional cases, where sufficient authority has proven some other process more reliable to attain the same end.

2. Recognizing the value of alcohol as a therapeutic and the propriety of its being dispensed as such by pharmacists, yet deploring the widespread evil resulting from its indiscriminate use in its hundred insidious forms, we condemn any attempt to make it a prominent feature of our business as unprofessional; and we denounce the loose practice of allowing it to be used on the premises, in any shape, as a beverage, as degrading, and we urge upon pharmacists the duty of exercising, at all times, a conscientious care in dispensing a drug liable to such dangerous abuse.

3. We discountenance all secret formulas between physicians and pharmacists, and consider it our duty to communicate such to each other when requested.

4. We distinctly repudiate the practice of allowing physicians a percentage on their prescriptions as derogatory to both professions.

5. We will endeavor, as far as it lies in our power to refrain from compromising the professional reputation of physicians, and we expect the same comity from them.

6. Since the professional training of pharmacists does not include those branches which enable the physician to diagnose and treat disease, we should, in all practical cases decline to give medical advice, and refer the applicant to a regular physician.

7. The growing demands of the age require that those who follow the profession of pharmacy should be educated to a higher standard. Therefore, we consider it our duty individually and collectively, to encourage the advancement of knowledge in our profession generally, and particularly by stimulating our assistants to attend the lectures of a college pharmacy, and by aiding and assisting them to do so.

8. Considering it expedient that some rule should be adopted to enforce the provisions of our code, we hereby agree, if any just cause of complaint of its violation be found against a member of this Association, to bring the case before a special, or at the next general meeting of the Association, when the accused, after being heard in his own defense, may be expelled by a vote of two-thirds of all the members present.

This section is not intended to interfere with the dispensing of prescriptions or medicines ordered in accordance with foreign Pharmacopoeias.