Texas’ Secret Supplier of Execution Drugs Is Accused of Enabling Drug Dealing

For at least the last six years, the Texas prison system’s method for acquiring pentobarbital – the substance it uses to execute death row inmates – has looked remarkably like a drug deal.

That’s the conclusion of death penalty opponents after a report from National Public Radio dropped on July 10. The source of Texas’ execution drugs has long been hidden from the public, but NPR’s Chiara Eisner used state and federal documents and interviews with an anonymous pharmacist to identify the supplier as a San Antonio company that the U.S. Department of Justice alleges has illegally dealt drugs and “fueled and profited from the opioid epidemic.”

Death penalty states have had difficulty finding suppliers of drugs used in lethal injection since at least 2014, when manufacturers began refusing to sell them for purposes of execution. Texas tried to acquire execution drugs from India in 2015 but the Food and Drug Administration seized them when they arrived in the U.S., declaring their importation illegal, per BuzzFeed News reporting at the time. This was just months after the state Legislature passed a law to make the names of any person or business facilitating executions, including executioners and drug providers, secret.

In recent years, Texas has had enough injectable pentobarbital to kill its death row inmates, but the state has repeatedly extended the expiration date of doses in stock – retesting the potency levels as the expirations elapse and then relabeling the drugs. (The practice has been criticized by death penalty opponents who question whether the expired pentobarbital is causing painful executions.)

Thanks to NPR, we now know at least some Texas execution drugs have been supplied by Rite-Away Pharmacy, which compounded the injectable form of pentobarbital used for lethal injections by the Texas prison system from at least 2019 to 2023. Rite-Away’s products were likely used in the executions of more than 20 Texans.

A 2022 lawsuit filed against Rite-Away by the U.S. Department of Justice alleged that the pharmacy violated the Controlled Substances Act by knowingly dispensing opioids without valid prescriptions. The DOJ suit also alleges that Rite-Away altered records, with close to 45,000 dosage units missing from their physical inventory. Rite-Away paid $275,000 late last year to settle the suit. Eisner’s research also shows that Rite-Away has been cited over a dozen times by the State Board of Pharmacy for failing to maintain sterile facilities.

News of TDCJ’s connection to Rite-Away was met with astonishment by death penalty critics. “They’re doing business with a pharmacy that has enabled drug dealing,” said Estelle Hebron-Jones of the Texas Defender Service. “It’s a pill mill. I think what needs to happen is that federal regulators need to step in and the DEA should seize the drugs and do an investigation into violations of the Controlled Substances Act. The DEA should impound the drugs.”

In her reporting, Eisner located a Rite-Away pharmacist who claimed to have compounded the pentobarbital for TDCJ. The pharmacist, whose name was not revealed, described how a Texas representative made contact with Rite-Away seven or more years ago to ask if the pharmacy would compound raw pentobarbital into the form used in lethal injections. After Rite-Away agreed, representatives of TDCJ periodically delivered powdered pentobarbital in unmarked cars.

“I don’t remember any of them ever coming in a [marked] vehicle,” the pharmacist told Eisner, “because, again, that would attract attention.”

State Rep. Joe Moody, one of the state Legislature’s foremost death penalty reformers, calls the revelation that Texas is doing business with Rite-Away “very troubling.” Moody has repeatedly introduced legislation to reverse the Legislature’s 2015 law hiding the identities of the companies facilitating executions. He said he will introduce the legislation again in the upcoming session.

“The most powerful thing that the government can do is take your life,” Moody told us. “That is the ultimate power that the government has, and if we’re willing to hide components of that in secrecy what does that say about us? I can’t justify it as an exception to the open records law. People should be able to understand what is involved when the government takes an individual’s life.”

Source: austinchronicle.com, Brant Bingamon, July 19, 2024

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