Europe Moves to Block Trade in Medical Drugs Used in US Executions –Ed Pilkington | Guardian UK

The European Commission has imposed tough new restrictions on the export of anesthetics used to execute people in the US, in a move that will exacerbate the already extreme shortage of the drugs in many of the 34 states that still practice the death penalty.

The EC has added eight barbiturates to its list of restricted products that are tightly controlled on the grounds that they may be used for “capital punishment, torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”. The eight include pentobarbital and sodium thiopental – the two drugs on which almost all American executions currently depend.

The EC said its move, which follows restrictions introduced unilaterally by the UK in November 2010, was designed to forward the European Union’s stated mission to abolish the death penalty around the world. “The decision today contributes to the wider EU efforts to abolish the death penalty worldwide,” said the commission’s vice president, Catherine Ashton.

The new regulations were welcomed by the UK’s business secretary Vince Cable, who pioneered Britain’s export controls. “We have led the way by introducing national controls on the export to the United States of certain drugs, which could be used for the purpose of lethal injection. However we have always stated our clear preference for action at EU level and I am pleased that, following our initiative, these steps are now being taken.”

Cable added that the new measure would ensure that the UK controls and others like it imposed by individual member states could not be circumvented by the movement of drugs around the EU.

Maya Foa, a lethal injection expert with the human rights group Reprieve who has led the campaign for greater controls on drugs used in US executions, said that the new regulations would be of huge importance both symbolically and practically. “This is going to force the states that still practice the death penalty to reconsider their protocols, and anything that gets them to think carefully about what they are doing has to be a good thing.”

Lethal injection has become in recent years the overwhelming method of judicial killings, with very rare exceptions such as Utah, which carried out an execution by firing squad in June 2010. Some states use a triple injection comprising a barbiturate to put the prisoner to sleep followed by other drugs to paralyze the body and then stop the heart.

Other states use a massive dose of barbiturate alone – but in either case sodium thiopental or pentobarbiatal are essential to the process.

In 2009 the only American manufacturer of sodium thiopental, the Illinois-based Hospira, suspended production because it was suffering commercially as a result of having its drug connected to executions. Then this summer, a Danish manufacturer of pentobarbital, Lundbeck, blocked the sale of its product trademarked Nembutal to any penal institution in the US.

Many states still have stocks of the two sedatives, but many are running low or passing their expiry date, leading to ever more desperate measures.

In March Georgia had its last supplies of sodium thiopental siezed by federal agents acting on information that the state had imported the substance from the UK before the British restrictions had been imposed, but without a proper license.

That did not stop Georgia, however, from executing Troy Davis in September having switched to pentobarbital.

Earlier this year the Obama administration made a direct appeal to Germany asking for supplies of the anesthetics, only to be roundly rebuffed by the German vice chancellor Philipp Rosler. “I noted the request and declined,” Rosler told Der Spiegel.

Reprieve hopes the European move will be just the start of an ever-tightening grip on medical drugs reaching US penitentiaries. Though the new restricted list covers the only two drugs currently used in American death penalties, the fear is that intrepid states will find a way round the controls by using other sedatives not on the list.

“We need to see a broad, catch-all provision to prevent any drugs from being used in capital punishment in order to ensure Europe is never again complicit in the death penalty,” Reprieve’s director, Clare Algar, said.

The EC, mindful of the possibility that states may try to circumvent the new regulations, says that it has the power to add other drugs to the list at will. It is also going to carry out a full review next year to see whether the controls on drugs used by US death row prisons are fool-proof.

Reprint: Europe Moves to Block Trade in Medical Drugs Used in US Executions –Ed Pilkington | Guardian UK

 

Drug Maker Opposes Use of Its Sedatives for Executions| MSNBC

This November 2005 file photo shows the death chamber at the Southern Ohio Corrections Facility in Lucasville, Ohio. Photo: Kiichiro Sato / AP

COLUMBUS, Ohio — The sole U.S. manufacturer of a sedative Ohio plans to use to execute death row inmates as Oklahoma already does opposes the practice and asked the states to stop.

Lundbeck Inc. says the use of pentobarbital in executions goes against everything the company is in business to do.

“We like to develop and make available therapies that improve people’s lives,” Sally Benjamin Young, spokeswoman for the Denmark-based company’s U.S. headquarters in Deerfield, Ill., told The Associated Press. “That’s the focus of our business.”

Young told msnbc.com that Lundbeck sent letters to Ohio and Oklahoma, but their contents were private. State prison officials in Ohio and Oklahoma both said they hadn’t seen copies of the letter Wednesday and could not comment.

The company issued a statement about the drug that has been available since 1930: “Lundbeck is dedicated to saving people’s lives. We do this by offering therapies that help treat people with some of the most challenging medical conditions, including epilepsy, Huntington’s disease and a range of other central nervous system disorders. Use of our products to end lives contradicts everything we’re in business to do.”

The statement acknowledged that Lundbeck cannot control applications of its products.

“Clearly, use of this product to carry out the death penalty in our nation’s prisons falls outside its intended use.”

Oklahoma has used the drug in combination with two others in three executions, while Ohio announced Tuesday it is switching to the sedative as the sole drug used to put inmates to death. Ohio has not yet purchased its first supplies and Oklahoma has said it obtains its supply from a private pharmacy. Both states switched to pentobarbital as a national shortage worsened of the drug they used previously, sodium thiopental.

That drug’s sole U.S. manufacturer, Hospira Inc., of Lake Forest, Ill., deplored the drug’s use in executions and also asked states not to use it, to no avail. The company announced last week it was discontinuing the product.

Pentobarbital is a barbiturate used to induce comas during surgeries to prevent brain damage when blood flow is interrupted, and to reduce possible brain damage following strokes or head trauma. It is chemically related to the same product used to euthanize pets.

Medical experts say Ohio and Oklahoma’s dosages are so big they’re lethal by themselves.

The amount that Oklahoma uses and Ohio has proposed — 5 grams — is 50 times the normal dosage used in hospitals, said Howard Nearman, chairman of the Anesthesiology Department at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland.

Not only would a dosage that size stop someone’s breathing, it would also likely cause a drastic drop in blood pressure, all of which would easily lead to a person’s death, Nearman said Wednesday.

Experts who testified in a federal lawsuit trying to stop Oklahoma’s proposed switch to pentobarbital were split on the drug’s effectiveness in putting humans to death.

The size of Oklahoma’s dosage “by itself would cause death in almost everyone,” Mark Dershwitz, a University of Massachusetts anesthesiologist, said in a report submitted to a federal judge in an Oklahoma hearing last year.

“It’s a massive overdose,” Dershwitz said Wednesday in a phone interview.

A second expert testifying in Oklahoma said the lack of clinical evidence for using pentobarbital as an anesthetic raises questions about its effectiveness in capital punishment.

“The use of pentobarbital as an agent to induce anesthesia has no clinical history and is non-standard,” Harvard medical professor David Waisel told the court.

“Because of these significant unknowns, and a lack of clinical history related to using pentobarbital to induce anesthesia, using pentobarbital as part of a 3-drug lethal injection protocol puts the inmate at an undue risk of suffering.”

Johnnie R. Baston, convicted of killing a Toledo store owner during a robbery, is scheduled to die by pentobarbital on March 10, 2011.

Waisel confirmed his comments in a follow-up phone interview Wednesday, saying there’s no way of knowing the drug’s effects.

The prisons department said it will use its remaining supply of sodium thiopental for the scheduled execution Feb. 17 of Frank Spisak, who killed three people at Cleveland State University in 1982.

Sodium thiopental is a rapid-onset, short-acting barbiturate that causes unconsciousness. It usually is followed by vecuronium bromide, which causes paralysis and stops breathing, and potassium chloride, which stops the heart.

Ohio’s first use of pentobarbital is planned for March’s scheduled execution of Johnnie Baston of Lucas County, condemned to die for shooting the owner of a Toledo store in the back of the head during a 1994 robbery.

The drug has been used in 200 of the 525 assisted suicides in Oregon since 1998, according to data compiled by the Oregon Public Health Division. It also was prescribed for 5 of 47 assisted-suicide patients in Washington state in 2009, state health statistics show.

The Dec. 16 execution of John David Duty, an Oklahoma death-row inmate, was believed to be the first use of pentobarbital in a lethal injection.

Lundbeck’s drug information says it’s brand of pentobarbital, Nembutal Sodium Solution, is a barbiturate “indicated for use as a sedative, a hypnotic for short-term treatment of insomnia, preanaesthetic and as an anticonvulsant in the emergency control of certain acute convulsive episodes.”

Lundbeck drug information warns that administering pentobarbital too rapidly may cause respiratory depression, loss of breathing, freezing up of vocal cords blocking air to the lungs, or widening of blood vessels with a fall in blood pressure.

Lundbeck does not condone use of this or any product for capital punishment,” the company said Wednesday.

Reprint: Drug Maker Opposes Use of Its Sedative for Executions | MSNBC