5. Standards available to manufacturers

5.1 Pharmacopoeia principles

Historically, pharmacopoeias were books describing medicinal plants, their mixtures and their therapeutic properties. Today, pharmacopoeias have evolved into veritable regulatory encyclopedias of medicinal products. They define the purity criteria for raw materials, as well as the analytical methods to be used to control them. All these descriptions are published in monograph form, and are considered authoritative in the country in which they were written.