Adulteration of Crude Drugs

Adulteration is a practice of substituting original crude drugs partially or fully with other similar looking substances but the later is either free from or inferior in chemical and therapeutic properties.

A  adulteration  may  also  be  defined  as  mixing  or  substituting  the  original  drug material with other spurious, inferior, defective, spoiled, useless other parts of same or different plant or harmful substances or drug which do not confirm with the official standards.

Types of Adulteration:

Adulteration can be broadly classified into two types

Intentional adulteration:

Intentional adulteration is mainly encouraged by traders because these original crude drugs are highly costly. So hence they use cheaper variety to reduce the cost burdane and to gain profit.

Accidental adulteration:

Accidental adulteration occurs without bad intention of the manufacturers or suppliers mainly it occurs during collection of drugs because of same morphological features between two plants.

Methods of Adulteration

There are seven types of adulteration methods. They are: Substitution with the sub-standard commercial verities Substitution with artificially manufactured drug Substitution by exhausted drugs

Substitution by superficially similar but cheaper natural substances

Substitution by the addition of worthless materials

Substitution by the addition of synthetic substance

Substitution of the different part of the plants