Danish drug maker H. Lundbeck A/S said Wednesday it will keep selling its Nembutal anesthetic in the U.S even though it opposes the drug's use there in lethal-injection executions.
Designed to treat epileptic seizures but also sometimes used to euthanize animals, Nembutal is being increasingly used in U.S. prison executions even though it wasn't meant for that purpose.
"We're doing everything we can to make sure the drug is used for the patients in the right way and trying to prevent misuse of the drug," Lundbeck's Chief Executive Ulf Wiinberg said. "The problem is that in the U.S., no one controls the end use of any medicine. Lundbeck's role is to be there for patients, and that's why it's still on the market."
He said Lundbeck is urgently looking into actively managing the drug's distribution there to ensure that patients have access to the drug, while also preventing its misuse. Asked if those steps will include "end-user clauses" and other restrictive measures, Mr. Wiinberg replied: "There are several options that we are exploring and once we've cleared our check list, then we'll make a decision on what to do."
The drug, acquired when the Danish company bought U.S.-based firm Ovation in 2009, has no strategic importance to Lundbeck and represents less than 1% of its overall sales.
"We acquired Ovation for use as a platform to launch ourselves into the U.S. market. Ovation had a strong CNS [central nervous system] and orphan drug orientation. But with that acquisition we also got a number of unimportant drugs which were going to go generic, and anesthetic Nembutal was one of them," Mr. Wiinberg said.
Prisons in the U.S. where capital punishment is conducted switched to Nembutal after U.S.-based Hospira Inc. decided earlier this year to stop making thiopental sodium, an anesthetic typically used to render a condemned inmate unconscious before other lethal drugs, including a paralytic agent, are administered.
Mr. Wiinberg said his initial reaction to news of Nembutal's use in executions was to pull it off the market. "But we were then told by the medical community that it would compromise treatment if we did that, because there's no comparable alternative on the market," he said.
The Danish government is also trying to help Lundbeck find a solution. Like most European countries, Denmark opposes capital punishment.
Mr. Wiinberg said Lundbeck gets many appeals from civil-rights groups as well as friends and family members of convicts on death row, urging the company to pull the drug. "We get appeals from all kinds of people who are engaged in this, directly or indirectly," he said.
"The Nembutal issue for us is one where it's financially irrelevant but where it's very important that we do the right thing and that we communicate the fact that we're doing the right thing in a transparent way. We're doing a lot of things. Some may work, and some may not work."
Source: Wall Street Journal, June 30, 2011
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