Texas Finds a New Drug Dealer
Texas prison officials said Wednesday they've acquired a new "small supply" of pentobarbital, the barbiturate Texas uses to execute prisoners by lethal injection, according to the AP. That means Texas has at least enough lethal-injection drugs on hand to kill all four prisoners slated for execution in April.
And, as is becoming standard practice in death penalty states across the country, Texas won't disclose the supplier of its new batch of death drugs.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice earlier this month revealed that it only had only enough pentobarbital on hand to get through two scheduled executions. The drug crunch faced by Texas and other death-penalty states is due in large part to drug manufacturers that years ago stopped selling states drugs for use in lethal injections. Texas and other death-penalty states were left scrambling to find drugs that could be used to carry out executions.
Around 2011, Texas ditched an until-then commonly used three-drug execution cocktail because manufacturers of a critical component, the sedative sodium thiopental, refused to sell the drug to prison officials. TDCJ eventually switched to its current drug of choice, pentobarbital, but even that soon became difficult to acquire, so Texas had to turn to so-called compounding pharmacies, which aren't regulated by the FDA.
Read more: http://blogs.houstonpress.com/news/2015/03/texas_finds_a_new_drug_dealer.php
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