Pharmacy Owner Having Second Thoughts About Being Texas' Only Supplier of Execution Drug
Death row inmate Michael Yowell's last-minute, Hail Mary lawsuit, based on the claim that the state was going to experiment on him with untested execution drugs, failed to sway U.S. District Judge Lynn Hughes. In an order handed down Saturday, she dismissed that as "a guess piled on an assumption" and ruled that the custom-mixed dose of pentobarbital would be just as ruthlessly lethal as the stuff pharmaceutical companies had stopped supplying for executions.
And, just so we're clear, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice has plenty of the drug. It ordered enough pentobarbital from a Texas compounding pharmacy "to carry out all currently scheduled executions" in the words of TDCJ spokesman Jason Clark.
Clark didn't name the pharmacy, but the Associated Press did. The wire service reported that the state had ordered eight 2.5-gram vials of pentobarbital from The Woodlands Compounding Pharmacy outside of Houston.
Pharmacy owner Dr. Jasper Lovoi, who quickly realized why drug makers are so hesitant to supply execution drugs, was livid.
"
I)t was my belief that this information would be kept on the 'down low,'" he wrote, "and that it was unlikely that it would be discovered that my pharmacy provided these drugs." Despite repeated assurances of secrecy from the state, "I find myself in the middle of a firestorm I was not advised of and did not bargain for."
More at
http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2013/10/pharmacy_owner_having_second_t.php .