"AP Exclusive: Danes won’t block execution drug," is the report via Google News. It's also available from the Las Vegas Sun and Ohio.com.
A Danish company that unwittingly has become a key supplier of an execution drug in the U.S. says it's not going to withdraw or restrict it, even though it objects to the chemical being "misused" for capital punishment.
Lundbeck A/S is doing "all we can" to dissuade U.S. states from using pentobarbital for lethal injections, but won't pull it from the U.S. market, CEO Ulf Wiinberg told The Associated Press on Wednesday.
Pentobarbital is a sedative with a range of medical uses, including treatment of epileptic seizures. It also is used to euthanize animals.
"Financially speaking this is not an important product for us and we thought about whether we should withdraw it and the reaction we got from doctors was that they didn't want us to withdraw the product," Wiinberg said at the drug maker's annual shareholders meeting in Copenhagen.
As the only company making the drug, Lundbeck found itself in an awkward position as death penalty states started switching to pentobarbital for lethal injections to replace another chemical that's no longer readily available.
Pentobarbital has already been used to execute prisoners in Ohio and Oklahoma. The first execution in Texas using pentobarbital is scheduled for next week. Mississippi and Arizona are also considering switching to pentobarbital for lethal injections.
"One of our products is being misused," Wiinberg said. "When we heard about this, we went out and took a very clear position, saying we are against the misuse of our product and that we, as an organization, made it clear that we are against death penalty."
Lundbeck A/S has written letters to prison authorities in U.S. states asking them not to use pentobarbital for lethal injections, but to no avail so far.
The company is now coming under pressure from human rights groups opposed to the death penalty to take stronger action, such as rewriting distribution contracts with clauses prohibiting sales of pentobarbital to U.S. prisons.
Lundbeck rejected that idea, saying it would be impossible for distributors to follow up on how every vial is used. Lundbeck says it sells about 50 million doses of pentobarbital a year.
Nathan Koppel's WSJ Law blog post, "Danish Maker of Execution Drug Will Not Block Sales to Prisons," noted in the previous post, has more on the Lundbeck statement.
Some death-penalty opponents have hoped that Lundbeck, the Danish maker of the sedative pentobarbital, would take steps to block its drug from being distributed to prisons, which increasingly are using it for executions.
Lundbeck, after all, has repeatedly and fervently said that it opposes the use of pentobarbital in executions, even sending letters to prison officials asking them to cease at once.
Anti-death penalty advocates have lobbied the company to go a step further and to rewrite its contracts with drug distributors to include language prohibiting distributors from selling pentobarbital to prisons for executions.
The company considered this idea “very seriously” but ultimately decided that it can not effectively block distribution to prisons, Lundbeck CEO Ulf Wiinberg told the Law Blog in an interview.
“We have explored the idea and don’t think it would make any difference,” Wiinberg said.
Drug distributors, he said, do business with thousands of customers. Given that wide network of end users, Wiinberg said, it is “not realistic” to expect a distributor to ensure that pentobarbital would not be misused in executions — and to be responsible if it was misused.
“When this situation happened, we took a strong public position against the way the drug has been used” by prisons, he said. “We have gone to end users and said it’s not an approved use. . . We will continue to object to the misuse of our product.”
Earlier coverage of Lundbeck's position is at the link.
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