Tennessee officials are still investigating why death row inmate Christa Pike survived an execution attempt after receiving two doses of pentobarbital, a drug intended to render a person unconscious and ultimately cause death. While the immediate focus has been on what went wrong inside the execution chamber, experts say Pike's case has also renewed scrutiny of a problem that has been building for more than a decade: how states obtain lethal injection drugs after pharmaceutical companies moved aggressively to keep their products from being used in executions. Despite those efforts, pentobarbital remains the primary execution drug used by many death-penalty states, making questions about sourcing, testing and oversight especially significant.
The issue has reshaped how many states carry out executions, forcing them to change drug protocols, seek alternative suppliers and adopt increasingly secretive procurement practices. "Drug shortages have devastated this country's execution process to an unparalleled degree," Deborah Denno, a Fordham University law professor who has studied lethal injection for decades, told Newsweek on Saturday. For years, states relied on commercially manufactured drugs obtained through traditional pharmaceutical channels.
That began to change after major drug manufacturers objected to having medicines designed to treat patients used in executions. According to Corinna Barrett Lain, a University of Richmond law professor and author of Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection, pharmaceutical companies have spent years trying to prevent their products from reaching execution chambers. "The bottom line is these drug companies, from the start, did not want their drugs being used in lethal injections with executions," Lain told Newsweek on Saturday.
Drugmakers increasingly adopted distribution controls and contractual restrictions barring execution use. The result, according to Lain, is that states seeking lethal injection drugs are now forced to look elsewhere. "Now states trying to buy drugs for lethal injection are stuck either intentionally breaching private contracts, and getting sued when they are discovered doing so, or buying compounded drugs from whatever compounding pharmacy is willing to sell a sterile injectable barbiturate without a prescription for cash in an under-the-table transaction," she said.
As pharmaceutical companies tightened restrictions, states increasingly turned to alternative methods of obtaining execution drugs. Some relied on compounding pharmacies, which create customized formulations of drugs rather than mass-produced pharmaceutical products. Others sought alternative suppliers or adopted increasingly secretive procurement practices.
Lain said those shifts have fundamentally changed the execution-drug market. Joel Zivot, a professor at Emory University School of Medicine, said the restrictions imposed by drug manufacturers forced states to seek alternative sources of execution drugs. "A gray market usually means legal goods moving through channels the manufacturer never authorized," he told Newsweek on Saturday.
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