The pharmaceutical industry in the industrial chemical group: The National Union of Chemical-Pharmaceutical Laboratories (1919-1936)

Abstract

The pharmaceutical industry associations, as it happened with other businesses, had a significant rise during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and II Republic. The Cámara Nacional de Industrias Químicas, in Barcelona, represented the national chemical industry to its ultimate assimilation by the Organización Sindical in 1939. In this association, matters relating to pharmaceutical products —which we will specially deal with in this work— were managed by the Unión Nacional de Laboratorios Químico-Farmacéuticos, which defended the interests of pharmaceutical companies in the presence of government authorities, using the resources and mechanisms also managed by business pressure groups. The inclusion of industrial pharmacy in the Chemical lobby separated the pharmaceutical industry from traditional exercise and its corporate environment. This created ups and downs, conflicts of interests and finally, love and hate relationships with their colleagues of the pharmacy work placement and, of course, with the association that represented them: the Unión Farmacéutica Nacional.