Texas Is Now a Drug Dealer, According to Court Filing

Texas prison officials are helping Virginia carry out a scheduled execution next week by providing that state with the lethal drug pentobarbital that corrections agencies nationwide have had difficulty obtaining.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice on Friday shot down allegations that it is manufacturing its own hard-to-find execution drugs after federal defense attorneys in an Oklahoma death row case accused the Texas prison system of doing exactly that.

In defending the use of midazolam in court, the Oklahoma Attorney General’s office has said the state would prefer to use pentobarbital, however finding the drug has become a “herculean effort”.

Texas prisons spokesman Jason Clark said the three vials of pentobarbital given to Virginia were legally purchased from a compounding pharmacy, which he declined to name.

Texas officials said the drugs were provided to Virginia as a favor for a 2013 trade when Virginia provided Texas a back-up dose of pentobarbital ahead of an execution there.

The disclosure was found in court documents for a prominent death penalty case in Oklahoma.

To mix, or “compound”, pentobarbital on site, TDCJ would be required to have a sterile compounding license issued by the State Pharmacy Board of Texas. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the use of midazolam in executions this June.

In order to prove that Oklahoma did not try hard enough to find more humane alternatives to its execution cocktail, Glossip’s attorneys must establish that alternatives are available.

Clark said that the dispatched drugs “have been tested for potency and purity and will expire in April 2016”. They argued the drug can cause agonizing pain and suffering, but the Supreme Court decided 5-4 against Glossip. “We would not utilize them”, Clark said.

As in other death penalty states, Texas prison officials had turned to unregulated compounding pharmacies after drug manufacturers, largely due to mounting pressure from anti-death penalty activists, stopped selling states drugs for use in lethal injections.

However, that secrecy has raised a legal challenge by death row inmates who want to know where the drugs that will kill them are coming from – a concern underscored by the botched execution of killer Clayton Lockett past year. The legislation, Senate Bill 1679, was intended to protect the companies providing the drugs from harassment and threats, according to author state Sen. “There are very few doses left of the drug that’s now being administered”. When the Woodlands Compounding Pharmacy backed out as Texas’s supplier, it became pretty clear that even pharmacies that might provide the drugs in secret wouldn’t do so in public. The powerful sedative achieved notoriety after it was used in executions that took longer than expected a year ago in Arizona, Ohio and Oklahoma. That same year, the European Union instituted an export ban on lethal-injection drugs.