Pfizer, the world’s biggest pharmaceutical company, said it would impose sweeping new controls on its supply chain to ensure its products are no longer used to kill inmates on death row.
Advertisement
The move apparently shuts off the last remaining open-market source of drugs for executions in the US.
Pfizer’s previous policy, dated last fall, said that it was seeking to restrict “unintended uses” of its drugs, but acknowledged that it was possible that due to the complexity of the supply chain, it could not guarantee that prisons could not obtain the drugs. In the past, some states have reportedly tried to import non-FDA-regulated drugs from outside the country for executions, but in most cases they were seized by federal agents at the borders. In 12 other executions, the drug cocktail did not cause obvious mishaps.
The announcement is the latest, and perhaps greatest, of a series of obstacles facing states that continue to utilize the death penalty. Anti-death penalty activists have been able to successfully persuade European pharamceutical companies not to sell execution drugs to the U.S.
The number of inmates who have been put to death has declined in recent years as correctional facilities had difficulty getting the medicines used in lethal injections, activists raised concerns about the practice and stories emerged about undue suffering and bungled execution attempts.
Drugs giant Pfizer has introduced restrictions on its products to stop them being used for executions. And previous year in Utah, the state passed a law bringing back the firing squad as a backup method of execution if there is a shortage of lethal injection drugs.
Dunham said that every single company involves in the production of such drugs had now spoken out against its products being used.
Seven states have abolished the death penalty since 2004, most recently Nebraska, where state legislators overrode Gov. Pete Ricketts’ veto.
“With Pfizer’s announcement, all F.D.A.-approved manufacturers of any potential execution drug have now blocked their sale for this goal”.
He added: “Now the death penalty in the USA is at its lowest level since 1991”.
But other states say they have been unable to find such suppliers.
Advertisement
The Alabama Attorney General’s Office argued in court filings that pentobarbital and sodium thiopental – two drugs used in the past – were not available through “standard channels”. A similar scene unfolded just months later on a gurney in Arizona, where Joseph Wood took one hour and 58 minutes to die by lethal injection in Arizona.
