Aspirin Intrigue

This reading accounts the events that took place in the decades immediately following the development of aspirin. Since a large part of this reading deals with products being mislabeled as aspirin, this reading would tie in well with the activity Real or Phony?, in which the students learn how to test if aspirin is real in the laboratory. As a demonstration you might want to illustrate other, more easily accessible color tests such as swabbing a bit of dilute tincture of iodine on a cut potato as a test for starch—the test surface turns blue.

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3 Fake Drugs Are Found in Pharmacies — from the New York Times, 5 June 2001.