Drugs to Kill

An unlikely story appeared on May 11 in the British Medical Journal: “US hospitals face shortages of anaesthesia drug as supplies are diverted for executions.” How can this happen in such a powerful country?

We will not find the answer to be a lack of economic resources or some other similar reason. The causes are very different: the pharmaceuticals mentioned are hoarded by some prison authorities.

For the U.S. prison system, collecting large amounts of anesthetics is a pressure — the penalty of failing to comply is to be unable to carry out numerous death sentences. The northern country is among those countries that carry out the most executions in the world, with almost all of them by lethal injection. For this purpose, the said medicines are part of the “lethal cocktail.”

To better understand this story, we are forced to recall what happened in early 2011 when the pharmaceutical company Hospira, the only domestic manufacturer of sodium thiopental (one of the most commonly used anesthetics in executions), ceased production. The reasons mentioned by the company were the difficulties presented by its raw material supplier. However, it is assured that the real cause was the strong campaign against the use of this drug for “executioner services.”

It quickly began to be guarded, with limited availability of these drugs in the country, thus delaying executions. The prison commanders were forced to import anesthetics from other countries, especially the U.K.

According to sources, the purchase and use of drugs for purposes other than those for which they are designed (healing the sick, not killing) has come under heavy criticism, and even retaliation, by some allies.

From the same time in 2011, the U.K. banned the export of the most commonly used drugs in the “lethal cocktail” to the United States. They also called on European countries to have a similar attitude.

The major problem is that prisons hoard medicines; therefore, hospitals cannot have them. Numerous members of the American Society of Anesthesiologists have expressed concern at the lack of first-line anesthetics in residential care, which endangers the lives of patients.

Death seems to have priority over life. Is that the kind of world that we deserve to have? Or is it the luck of a backward world?

Julio Cesar Hernandez Perera is a medical doctor and a second-degree specialist in internal medicine.