Legal News

Danish Maker of Execution Drug Will Not Block Sales to Prisons

By Nathan Koppel

Some death-penalty opponents have hoped that Lundbeck, the Danish maker of the sedative pentobarbital, would take steps to block its drug from being distributed to prisons, which increasingly are using it for executions.

Lundbeck, after all, has repeatedly and fervently said that it opposes the use of  pentobarbital in executions, even sending letters to prison officials asking them to cease at once.

Anti-death penalty advocates have lobbied the company to go a step further and to rewrite its contracts with drug distributors to include language prohibiting distributors from selling pentobarbital to prisons for executions.

The company considered this idea “very seriously” but ultimately decided that it can not effectively block distribution to prisons, Lundbeck CEO Ulf Wiinberg told the Law Blog in an interview.

“We have explored the idea and don’t think it would make any difference,” Wiinberg said.

Drug distributors, he said, do business with thousands of customers. Given that wide network of end users, Wiinberg said, it is “not realistic” to expect a distributor to ensure that pentobarbital would not be misused in executions — and to be responsible if it was misused.

“When this situation happened, we took a strong public position against the way the drug has been used” by prisons, he said. “We have gone to end users and said it's not an approved use. . . We will continue to object to the misuse of our product.”

In other news, University of Texas law school professor Maurie Levin today wrote a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder claiming that the Texas prison system has likely violated federal law by purchasing drugs with a Drug Enforcement Administration registration number assigned to a hospital that has been closed since 1983.  Levin asks Holder in the letter to investigate Texas. (Click here to see the letter.)

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice did not return a request for comment.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 30, 2011 (boomark / email).