Lacking enough of the anesthetic essential to the cocktail of lethal drugs administered during executions, several US states are being forced to postpone the procedure until early next year.
At the heart of the drug supply problem is Hospira, the only pharmaceutical company that produces the anesthetic sodium thiopental.
“We are working to get it back on the market and we anticipate we will by 2011,” a Hospira spokesman said.
The US Food and Drug Administration does not approve the drug’s use in lethal injections and Hospira does not sell it for that purpose, though prison officials make significant use of sodium thiopental in executions.
“This is an anesthetic agent that is used by hospital and it is not indicated for capital punishment,” the spokesman added. “We do not make it for that, we don’t support its use in that procedure.”
He said that Hospira does not disclose sales of the drug because it is not a big seller for the company.
Death row inmates are injected intravenously with three drugs once strapped in the death chamber: First they are put to sleep with sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide then paralyzes their muscles and stops their breathing and finally, potassium chloride stops their heart.
Two states — Ohio in the Midwest and Washington in the Northwest — have opted to carry out executions by injecting only sodium thiopental, but at very high and deadly doses.
The supply dry-up nationwide has prompted Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear to announce he would only sign one of the three execution orders pending on his desk.
“The Kentucky Department of Corrections has a sufficient amount of sodium thiopental for one execution and that amount expires on Oct. 1, 2010,” he added in a statement.
Gregory Wilson, who has been on death row for 22 years, will thus be executed on Sept. 16 with the state’s last dose of the drug. However, his fellow inmates Ralph Baze and Robert Foley, who like Wilson have also exhausted all their appeals, will be granted an additional, if somewhat accidental, reprieve.
In Oklahoma, authorities only have enough sodium thiopental for one execution although two are scheduled — for Oct. 14 and Oct. 15.
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