Pharmacy laws generally include the regulations for the practice of pharmacy, the sale of poisons, the dispensing of narcotics, and the labeling and sale of dangerous drugs. The pharmacist sells and dispenses drugs within the provisions of the food and drug laws of the country in which he practices. These laws recognize the national pharmacopoeia (which defines products used in medicine, their purity, dosages, and other pertinent data) as the standard for drugs. The World Health Organization of the United Nations began publishing the Pharmacopoeia Internationalis in the early 1950s. Its purpose is to standardize drugs internationally and to supply standards, strengths, and nomenclature for those countries that have no national pharmacopoeia. Pharmaceutical research, in schools of pharmacy and in the laboratories of the pharmaceutical manufacturing houses, embraces the organic chemical synthesis of new chemical agents for use as drugs and is also concerned with the isolation and purification of plant constituents that might be useful as drugs. Research in pharmacy also includes formulation of dosage forms of medicaments and study of their stability, methods of assay, and standardization.