The Death Penalty: Do Not Supply Pentobarbital to Prisons!

Franz Kafka wrote that in Prague the executioners looked like beardless tenors. In U.S. prisons they look like doctors who betray the Hippocratic Oath with their lethal injections. The medicalization of the execution, which is said to be “more humane” than the electric chair or hanging, is a blatant violation of medical ethics.

In the 35 U.S. states that execute condemned criminals, 3,330 people are waiting for the lethal injection. Some of them are currently living on an unplanned reprieve: The U.S. has run out of one of the three stipulated ingredients for the death cocktail — an anesthetic with the active agent sodium thiopental. The only U.S. company that used to produce the agent took it off the market in the fall under pressure from growing protests. Since then, the Department of Corrections, which is dependent on these drugs, is knocking on the doors of foreign countries.

Prison authorities of individual states had initially sourced the scarce sodium thiopental from the E.U. This is how Jeffrey Landrigan came to be executed on Oct. 25 in Arizona with a poison mixture that came from the U.K. But U.S. federal laws require strict controls on the import of drugs, and the importers must be registered with the Drug Enforcement Administration.

This is why Oklahoma and Ohio have changed their enforcement law. Instead of thiopental, they have since been using pentobarbital from the Danish pharmaceutical group Lundbeck, which is sold in the U.S. Lundbeck, a long-established company, is the only licensed manufacturer of the drug in the U.S. Other states have followed suit. Aside from treating chronic epilepsy, the concoction, developed by Bayer in 1916, is mainly used today for putting animals to sleep. However, 18 criminals have also been killed in the U.S. using pentobarbital.

On the Old Continent, there is widespread resistance against the U.S. execution practice. It connects Brussels and London, Italian members of parliament and German politicians. The E.U. already prohibited any assistance for executions in the U.S. earlier this year. Philipp Rösler, former German health minister, followed on the heels of the appeal with an urgent plea to pharmaceutical companies and drug dealers to refuse delivery requests from the U.S.

Italy’s parliament stopped U.S. company Hospira’s attempt to produce thiopental in its factory near Milan. Even London fell in line with European policy to achieve the abolition of the death penalty around the world and imposed an export ban. Now even the pharmaceutical company Lundbeck has proceeded to take action.

The company from Denmark — where there have been no more executions of civilians since 1882 — was suddenly the only supplier for the anesthetic injections on death row. On July 1 Lundbeck pulled the plug. The company announced that pentobarbital is now exclusively shipped through a distribution program that excludes any delivery to prisons that administer the lethal injection. For Irish neurologist David Nicholl, it is a milestone in the fight against the death penalty: “This is the first time that a major global pharmaceutical company has taken such direct action.”

This was initiated by Nicholl and 60 of his colleagues. “We are appalled,” they wrote in early June in the medical journal The Lancet. “Pentobarbital is rapidly proving to be the drug of choice for U.S. executions.” They added that Lundbeck must ensure that its products are only supplied for chronic epilepsy “but not to executioners.”

Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” is about a traveler who proudly performs an execution of a European superpower by machine from a faraway island. Fortunately, there is no longer such a superpower in Europe.