The latest issue of Lobby Watch, the publication of the campaign finance reforem advocate Texans for Public Justice, spotlights Texas connections to the maker and a seller of sodium thiopental. It's titled, "Who Sells Execution Solutions? Global Supply Chain Strains Huntsville’s Lethal Injections." It's in Adobe .pdf format.
Long addicted to lethal injections, Texas is having trouble scoring a fix. In November Britain banned exports of sodium thiopental, one of three drugs that Texas uses in its death-row cocktails.
At the time, the only U.S. producer of the drug was shifting its thiopental production to Italy. On Christmas Eve Italy’s Parliament unanimously demanded guarantees from Illinois-based Hospira, Inc. that no thiopental produced there would be used in executions. Saying it could not make such guarantees, Hospira opted to abandon the product. Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini praised the company for helping Italy “prevent the drug from reaching U.S. penitentiaries and being used for capital punishment.”
Hospira makes drugs “to improve or save lives” and condemns lethal, off-label uses of them for executions, says spokesman Dan Rosenberg. The company conveyed this position to the prison systems of all 50 states last March, he says.
And:
Last week death-row defense attorneys smoked out one of Hospira’s distributors when they forced the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) to disclose the source of its execution drugs. A state judge ordered the agency to release documents that show that it got all three of its execution drugs from Besse Medical, a unit of AmerisourceBergen Corp.3
Maurie Levin of the University of Texas’ Capital Punishment Clinic helped force TDCJ to disclose its supply chain for death-row drugs. She says the documents show that TDCJ ordered “the very three drugs that they use in lethal injections” from Amerisource’s Besse Medical. “It’s implausible that the supplier didn’t know what these drugs were used for,” Levin says.
Amerisource representatives did not return calls about the matter. Spokeswoman Barbara Brungess told Lobby Watch in a written statement that “AmerisourceBergen has no insight into how a licensed provider uses a product.” She added that the company “has no stated position on the death penalty.” Does Amerisource supply lethal-injection drugs to prisons in any other states? “We do not discuss any individual customers,” Brungess wrote.
Earlier news from Texas begins at the link; more lethal injection coverage starts in the preceding post.
Related posts are in the lethal injection index.
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