The Drug Enforcement Agency seized Georgia's sketchy stash of sodium thiopental, an essential ingredient in the state's lethal injection cocktail. Thirty-five states use the drug for lethal injections.
The feds suspect that the state was buying the fast-acting barbiturate illegally overseas.
Records show that the Georgia Department of Corrections was buying from Dream Pharma, a distributor operating out of the back of a grungy-looking driving school in London. California and Arizona also reportedly bought thiopental from Dream Pharma.
It's unclear where Dream Pharma got the drug.
Sodium thiopental has become scarce in the U.S. since the only FDA-approved American manufacturer, Hospira, stopped making the drug in 2009 due to manufacturing problems at its North Carolina facility.
Hospira announced in January that it was permanently halting thiopental production. Hospira has relocated to Italy, and Italian regulators want assurances that the drug will only be used for medical purposes and not for lethal injections, and Hospira says it can't guarantee that wholesalers won't resell the drug to corrections departments.
Thiopental also has vital medical applications. In February, the American Society of Anesthesiologists asked the FDA to allow the drug to be legally imported from overseas. The ASA says the drug is the preferred drug to induce general anesthesia for Cesarean sections because it doesn't cross the placenta, like other widely used agents. Thiopental is also a mainstay for elderly patients, heart surgery, and brain surgery because it's less likely than other drugs to dangerously depress blood pressure.
After Hospira announced that it was getting out of the market, Germany's health minister appealed to his country's thiopental makers not to sell to the U.S., and the industry agreed.
Could "fair trade" thiopental solve the impasse and get patients the drugs they need? Maybe pharmaceutical companies could agree to sell exclusively to physician-controlled co-ops that pledge not to resell the drug for executions. The American Medical Association's code of ethics prohibits doctors from participating in executions, though no state medical board has ever disciplined a doctor for doing so.
Drug diversion would probably still be a problem. States desperate for a death fix will continue to scrounge thiopental anywhere they can; but keeping medical thiopental out of the hands of executioners is a much better use of DEA resources than most of what the agency currently does.
