Quick, Watson!

Sherlock Holmes would have been at home in Brazil, land of the needle. Brazilians consider an injection, rather than a pill, the handiest way to cure anything from calcium deficiency to syphilis. Stenographers inject each other with vitamin compounds at tea time. Druggists give shots to customers in back rooms, send errand boys out to needle homebound clients. The charge: 15-c-. Thus, when the Government last fortnight banned drugstore injections, it threatened the clinical habits of a nation. Grounds: insanitary needles. Real reason: the dope needle was also flourishing.

The ban loosed a popular hue & cry. Said Rio's Diario Carioca: "The poor were seized with panic, since it cut off their only convenient, practical, inexpensive way to care for their health." Tongue-in-cheek Columnist Rubem Braga, in Diretrizes, suggested "installation of public injection centers, thus permitting the formation of long queues which could join with all the other queues into which the population has been marshaled."

Outfaced by public clamor and ridicule, and the Brazilian Association of Pharmacists, the Government last week backed down. Druggists could needle cariocas.

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