Shortage Forces Texas To Switch Execution Drug

Holding cells and execution chamber
Huntsville Unit, Texas

Texas is changing one of the drugs used to conduct executions in the nation's busiest death penalty state due to a shortage of a sedative it's used for nearly three decades, officials said Wednesday.

Texas Department of Criminal Justice officials said they plan to substitute pentobarbital for sodium thiopental in the three-drug cocktail used for lethal injections. Pentobarbital, a surgical sedative, also is commonly used to euthanize animals and recently has been used for executions in Oklahoma.

A shortage of sodium thiopental has forced multiple states to scramble for substitutes. Texas has used the drug since becoming the first state to do lethal injections in 1982. Texas' supply of sodium thiopental expires at the end of this month and an execution is set for early April.

Agency spokeswoman Michelle Lyons said Rick Thaler, director of the agency's institutional division, authorized the switch.

"It's in the state statute that changes in chemical and dosages may be made at the discretion of the institutional division director," she said. "We were looking for a drug with similar properties to sodium thiopental and this drug has been used in the Oklahoma execution process so there is a precedent for its use in executions."

Pentobarbital use has survived court challenges in Oklahoma, which also uses it in conjunction with two other drugs that paralyze inmates and stop their hearts. Ohio recently switched to pentobarbital as the sole drug used for its executions.

Texas' prison director has the authority to tweak the state's execution process, like changing the drug, and only a switch from lethal injection to another form of capital punishment would require legislative action in Texas. Texas used the electric chair for executions from the 1920s until the 1960s.

Texas inmate Charlie Brooks became the first in the nation to be executed by injection on Dec. 7, 1982. Texas has since executed 466 people, far more than any other state. Seventeen inmates were put to death last year in Texas and two have been executed this year.

Convicted killer Cleve Foster, who is scheduled for execution on April 5, would be the first to be given the new drug in Texas. At least four other inmates are on the state's execution schedule for the coming months. Other drugs used in the process are pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride.

The sodium thiopental shortage has delayed executions in several states and an Associated Press review found that at least five states — Arizona, Arkansas, California, Georgia and Tennessee — had to turn to England for their supply of the drug. Nebraska, meanwhile, secured a stockpile from an Indian firm. On Tuesday, Drug Enforcement Administration agents seized Georgia's supply of the sedative, saying officials had questions about how the drug was imported.

Source: AP, March 16, 2011

Texan executioners turn to Danish manufacturer Lundbeck for experimental lethal injection drug

Danish pharmaceutical manufacturer Lundbeck is set to become the primary source of lethal injection drugs for Texas, the busiest executing state in the US, after the state changed its lethal injection procedure in response to a nationwide shortage of the anaesthetic sodium thiopental.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice plans to replace thiopental with pentobarbital -- for which Lundbeck is the sole FDA-approved supplier in the USA.

Lundbeck’s response will determine the fate of scores of prisoners, not just in Texas, but across the US prison system. Texas is the leading death penalty state, and the third to change its protocol to pentobarbital, putting Lundbeck at serious risk of becoming the main go-to point for execution chambers throughout the country. Texas’s supply of sodium thiopental expires on the 31st March; the state has three executions already scheduled from April to July, for which it will be relying on Lundbeck’s Danish drugs to kill prisoners.

The use of pentobarbital in executions is experimental and considered highly dangerous because the drug, a sedative, was not designed to be used as an anaesthetic. According to Dr. David Waisel, Associate Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School: “The use of pentobarbital as an agent to induce anesthesia has no clinical history and is non-standard… the combination of significant unknowns… puts the inmate at risk of serious undue pain and suffering.”

Texas’s decision to switch drugs comes after the US Drug Enforcement Administration seized Georgia's British-sourced sodium thiopental amid increasing fears that the drug has caused excruciating pain to prisoners.

The first prisoner likely to be killed with Lundbeck drugs, Cleve Foster, was sentenced to death for a 2002 murder, despite the fact that another man had confessed to the crime. Cleve is facing execution in Texas on 5th April.

Reprieve's Director Clive Stafford Smith said: "This is the moment of truth for Lundbeck. As a supposedly ethical company, will it baulk at profiting from the killing of prisoners?”

Source: Reprieve, March 16, 2011
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