Death Penalty Drugs Given Deadly Blow

 

death-lethal-injection

U.S. imports of sodium thiopental – often called the “truth serum” –
have been banned by a judge because of the poor quality of imports,
particularly from the UK. The ruling has struck a serious blow against
the death penalty in the U.S., because of the key role the drug plays in
lethal injections. Not surprising, Texas, which carries
out the largest number of executions in the country, is furious.

The
United States is the only Western country that executes prisoners. It
ranks fifth in the world of countries that do so, after China, Iran,
Saudi Arabia, and Iraq, just ahead of Yemen, according to Amnesty’s latest report on the death penalty. Authorities typically administer sodium thiopental as the first of cocktail of three drugs, to kill prisoners on death row.

Hospira,
the only U.S. manufacturer of the drug, initially suspended production
in the summer of 2010 because of quality control issues and then decided to exit the market altogether.
This was because after the patent for the drug expired, the price
plummeted to the point where the company could no longer compete with
generic versions produced in other countries like India.

Enter
Dream Pharma, a one-man operation above a driving school in Acton, West
London. Mehdi Alavi, an Iranian-British businessman, who runs the
company, did a brisk business selling of sodium thiopental to states like Arizona and Georgia.

The
trouble with Alavi’s scheme was that the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration has never approved the import of sodium thiopental.
Arizona inmate Donald Edward Beaty and several others sued in February
2011 to stop executions over this discrepancy. Beaty was executed with
pentobarbital sodium injection instead last year, but the case
eventually went before U.S. District Judge Richard Leon who ruled that
the imports were illegal.

“The FDA appears to be simply wrapping
itself in the flag of law enforcement discretion to justify its
authority and masquerade an otherwise seemingly callous indifference to
the health consequences of those imminently facing the executioner’s
needle. How utterly disappointing!” Leon wrote in his final opinion.

Maya Foa, an investigator with Reprieve,
a UK charity that campaigns against the death penalty, said:  “Judge
Leon’s strong judgment in this case is most welcome, and will hopefully
spell the end of the sordid scramble for execution drugs which we’ve
witnessed over the past 18 months.”

Reprieve, which exposed
Alavi’s contracts with the state of Georgia, is now leading a campaign
to get pharmaceutical companies to sign a tailor-made “Pharmaceutical Hippocratic Oath
that states: “We dedicate our work to developing and distributing
pharmaceuticals to the service of humanity; we will practice our
profession with conscience and dignity; the right to health of the
patient will be our first consideration; we condemn the use of any of
our pharmaceuticals in the execution of human beings.”

On March
28, 2012, Lundbeck, a Danish company, became the first to sign the oath.
The company which is the only licensed U.S. producer of pentobarbital
sodium (one of the drugs used to kill Beaty) has already stated that it
will not sell Nembutal to prisons in U.S. states that carry out
executions.

Texas authorities are furious.
In a letter sent to the state attorney general, the Texas Department of
Criminal Justice, says that Reprieve “crosses the line from social
activists dedicated to their cause to authoritarian ideologues who
menace and harass private citizens who decline to submit to Reprieve’s
opinion on the morality of capital punishment by lethal injection.”  

The
prison authority goes on to compare Reprieve’s tacticts to “classic,
hallmark practices comparable to practices by gangs incarcerated in the
TDCJ who intimidate and coerce rival gang members and which have erupted
into prison riots.”

However the Texas Department of Criminal Justice stops short of suggesting the death penalty for human rights activists.

 

March 28, 2012 – CorpWatch

 

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