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  1. #301
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    Pfizer Blocks the Use of Its Drugs in Executions

    By ERIK ECKHOLM
    The New York Times

    The pharmaceutical giant Pfizer announced on Friday that it has imposed sweeping controls on the distribution of its products to ensure that none are used in lethal injections, a step that closes off the last remaining open-market source of drugs used in executions.

    More than 20 American and European drug companies have already adopted such restrictions, citing either moral or business reasons. Nonetheless, the decision from one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical manufacturers is seen as a milestone.

    “With Pfizer’s announcement, all F.D.A.-approved manufacturers of any potential execution drug have now blocked their sale for this purpose,” said Maya Foa, who tracks drug companies for Reprieve, a London-based human rights advocacy group. “Executing states must now go underground if they want to get hold of medicines for use in lethal injection.”

    The obstacles to lethal injection have grown in the last five years as manufacturers, seeking to avoid association with executions, have barred the sale of their products to corrections agencies. Experiments with new drugs, a series of botched executions and covert efforts to obtain lethal chemicals have mired many states in court challenges.

    The mounting difficulty in obtaining lethal drugs has already caused states to furtively scramble for supplies.

    Some states have used straw buyers or tried to import drugs from abroad that are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration, only to see them seized by federal agents. Some have covertly bought supplies from compounding pharmacies while others, including Arizona, Oklahoma and Ohio, have delayed executions for months or longer because of drug shortages or legal issues tied to injection procedures.

    A few states have adopted the electric chair, firing squad or the gas chamber as an alternative if lethal drugs are not available. Since Utah chooses to have a death penalty, “we have to have a means of carrying it out,” said State Representative Paul Ray as he argued last year for reauthorization of the state’s death penalty.

    Lawyers for condemned inmates have challenged the efforts of corrections officials to conceal how the drugs are obtained, saying this makes it impossible to know if they meet quality standards or might cause undue suffering.

    “States are shrouding in secrecy aspects of what should be the most transparent government activity,” said Ty Alper, associate director of the death penalty clinic at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.

    Before Missouri put to death a prisoner on Wednesday, for example, it refused to say in court whether the lethal barbiturate it used, pentobarbital, was produced by a compounding pharmacy or a licensed manufacturer. Akorn, the only approved company making that drug, has tried to prevent its use in executions.

    Pfizer’s decision follows its acquisition last year of Hospira, a company that has made seven drugs used in executions including barbiturates, sedatives and agents that cause paralysis or heart failure. Hospira had long tried to prevent diversion of its products to state prisons but had not succeeded; its products were used in a prolonged, apparently agonizing execution in Ohio in 2014, and are stockpiled by Arkansas, according to documents obtained by reporters.

    Because these drugs are also distributed for normal medical use, there is no way to determine what share of the agents used in recent executions were produced by Hospira, or more recently, Pfizer.

    Campaigns against the death penalty, and Europe’s strong prohibitions on the export of execution drugs, have raised the stakes for pharmaceutical companies. But many, including Pfizer, say medical principles and business concerns have guided their policies.

    “Pfizer makes its products to enhance and save the lives of the patients we serve,” the company said in Friday’s statement, and “strongly objects to the use of its products as lethal injections for capital punishment.”

    Pfizer said it would restrict the sale to selected wholesalers of seven products that could be used in executions. The distributors must certify that they will not resell the drugs to corrections departments and will be closely monitored.

    David B. Muhlhausen, an expert on criminal justice at the Heritage Foundation, accused Pfizer and other drug companies of “caving in to special interest groups.” He said that while the companies have a right to choose how their products are used, their efforts to curb sales for executions “are not actually in the public interest” because research shows, he believes, that the death penalty has a deterrent effect on crime.

    Pressure on the drug companies has not only come from human rights groups. Trustees of the New York State pension fund, which is a major shareholder in Pfizer and many other producers, have used the threat of shareholder resolutions to push two other companies to impose controls and praised Pfizer for its new policy.

    “A company in the business of healing people is putting its reputation at risk when it supplies drugs for executions,” Thomas P. DiNapoli, the state comptroller, said in an email. “The company is also risking association with botched executions, which opens it to legal and financial damage.”

    Less than a decade ago, lethal injection was generally portrayed as a simple, humane way to put condemned prisoners to death. Virtually all executions used the same three-drug combination: sodium thiopental, a barbiturate, to render the inmate unconscious, followed by a paralytic and a heart-stopping drug.

    In 2009, technical production problems, not the efforts of death-penalty opponents, forced the only federally approved factory that made sodium thiopental to close. That, plus more stringent export controls in Europe, set off a cascade of events that have bedeviled state corrections agencies ever since.

    Many states have experimented with new drug combinations, sometimes with disastrous results, such as the prolonged execution of Joseph R. Wood III in Arizona in 2014, using the sedative midazolam. The state’s executions are delayed as court challenges continue.

    Under a new glaring spotlight, deficiencies in execution procedures and medical management have also been exposed. After winning a Supreme Court case last year for the right to execute Richard E. Glossip and others using midazolam, Oklahoma had to impose a stay only hours before Mr. Glossip’s scheduled execution in September. Officials discovered they had obtained the wrong drug, and imposed a moratorium as a grand jury conducts an investigation.

    A majority of the 32 states with the death penalty have imposed secrecy around their drug sources, saying that suppliers would face severe reprisals or even violence from death penalty opponents. In a court hearing this week, a Texas official argued that disclosing the identity of its pentobarbital source “creates a substantial threat of physical harm.”

    But others, noting the evidence that states are making covert drug purchases, see a different motive. “The secrecy is not designed to protect the manufacturers, it is designed to keep the manufacturers in the dark about misuse of their products,” said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a research group in Washington.

    Georgia, Missouri and Texas have obtained pentobarbital from compounding pharmacies, which operate without normal F.D.A. oversight and are intended to help patients meet needs for otherwise unavailable medications.

    But other states say they have been unable to find such suppliers.

    Texas, too, is apparently hedging its bets. Last fall, shipments of sodium thiopental, ordered by Texas and Arizona from an unapproved source in India, were seized in airports by federal officials.

    For a host of legal and political reasons as well as the scarcity of injection drugs, the number of executions has declined, to just 28 in 2015, compared with a recent peak of 98 in 1999, according to the Death Penalty Information Centre.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/14/us...T.nav=top-news

  2. #302
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    Anyone else not know Pfizer manufactured these drugs? I didn't. Why do they announce it?
    “Ninety-nine percent have made peace with their God. Their victims didn’t have that choice.”

    “You're not entitled to a pain-free execution.”

  3. #303
    Suco
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    I wonder what they will use now?

  4. #304
    Senior Member Member Slayer's Avatar
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    Is this something to be worried about?

  5. #305
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    Pfizer caves in to anti-DP pressure. Impact, if any, unclear.

    By Kent Scheidegger
    crimeandconsequences.com

    It is being widely reported in the press that drug manufacturer Pfizer is putting restrictions on the sale of its drugs to prevent them being used in executions. However, no press release to that effect is on their press release page as of this writing.

    I was not aware that any state was using a Pfizer-brand drug, so the impact is unclear. There may not be any impact at all.

    The states most actively carrying out executions have been getting their drugs from compounding pharmacies. The statement by the opponents that Pfizer's action drives the sourcing "underground" is nonsense. There is nothing "underground" about compounding pharmacies.

    The lethal injection drugs of choice remain thiopental and pentobarbital, and all we really need is for Congress or the Supreme Court to abrogate or overrule the D.C. Circuit's wrongly-decided Cook case so that imports from Asia can resume. Any questions about purity or potency can be easily resolved by testing.

    http://www.crimeandconsequences.com/...ti-dp-pre.html

  6. #306
    Senior Member Frequent Poster schmutz's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Slayer View Post
    Is this something to be worried about?
    Yes, to the degree that it could be a sign that they are making nice to the Europeans in preparation for a sale and the nasty capital gain I'll get hit with. Time to find a State Electrician.

  7. #307
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Alright so I looked up the drugs that Pfizer makes.

    The six drugs on Pfizer’s banned list, are hydromorphone and propofol, both anesthetics, and pancuronium bromide and vecuronium bromide, both paralytics

    The chemicals banned for sale by Pfizer include the sedative midazolam, which has been used to render a prisoner unconscious, and potassium chloride, which can cause cardiac arrest.

    http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/...ions/84499810/

    http://www.aol.com/article/2016/05/1...-u-s/21378991/

    Alabama has claimed that Pfizer decision isn't effecting their execution process so that must mean they aren't buying from Pfizer.

    They don't make pentobarbital so there shouldn't be any issues. The media is hyping up this story like crazy though.
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  8. #308
    Senior Member Member Slayer's Avatar
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    So Let Me guess this whole Story was rubbish from the get-go I've checked Amnesty's webpage and even they haven't crowed about it which leads me to think the whole thing has been overblown.

  9. #309
    Senior Member Frequent Poster Steven AB's Avatar
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    On how to deal with the drug shortage problem:

    Last edited by Steven AB; 01-26-2024 at 10:30 AM.
    "If ever there were a case for a referendum, this is one on which the people should be allowed to express their own views and not irresponsible votes in the House of Commons." — Winston Churchill, on the death penalty

    The self-styled "Death Penalty Information Center" is financed by the oligarchic European Union. — The Daily Signal

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