Its common adulterants are iron oxides, powdered barytes and brick dust.
Several green-coloured beetles are, on account of their colour, used as adulterants to cantharides, but they are very easily detected by examination with the eye, or, if powdered, with the microscope.
Various other adulterants are sometimes used, such as the inspissated juice of the prickly pear, extracts from tobacco, stramonium and hemp, pulp of the tamarind and bael fruit, mahwah flowers and gums of different kinds.
In a legalized framework, drugs would not contain adulterants and impurities, and dosage would be accurately quantified.