Death penalty opponents hail ethics ruling that could further restrict availability and increase pressure on state authorities to halt capital punishment

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

A leading association for US pharmacists has told its members they should not provide drugs for use in lethal injections — a move that could make carrying out executions even harder for death penalty states.

The declaration approved by American Pharmacists Association delegates at a meeting in San Diego says the practice of providing lethal-injection drugs is contrary to the role of pharmacists as healthcare providers.

The association lacks legal authority to bar its members from selling execution drugs but its policies set pharmacists’ ethical standards.

Pharmacists now join doctors and anaesthesiologists in having national associations with ethics codes that call on members not to participate in executions.

“Now there is unanimity among all health professions in the United States who represent anybody who might be asked to be involved in this process,” said association member Bill Fassett, who voted for the policy.

The American Pharmacists Association has more than 62,000 members.

Compounding pharmacies, which make drugs specifically for individual clients, only recently became involved in the execution-drug business.

Prison departments have turned to made-to-order cocktails from compounding pharmacies because pharmaceutical manufacturers started to refuse to sell the drugs that had been used for decades in lethal injections after coming under pressure from death penalty opponents.

The compounded version is also becoming difficult to obtain, with most pharmacists reluctant to expose themselves to possible harassment by death penalty opponents.

The prison agency in Texas scrambled this month to find a supplier to replenish its inventory before getting drugs from a compounding pharmacy it will not identify.

After a troubling use of a two-drug method in 2014, Ohio has said it will use compounded versions of either pentobarbital or sodium thiopental in the future, though it does not have supplies of either and has not said how it will obtain them. All executions scheduled this year were pushed to 2016 to give the state more time to find the drugs.



Others states are turning to alternative methods.

Tennessee has approved the use of the electric chair if lethal injection drugs are not available, while Utah has reinstated the firing squad as a backup method if it cannot obtain the drugs. Oklahoma is considering legislation that would make it the first state to allow the use of nitrogen gas as a potential method.

Fassett, a professor emeritus of pharmacy law and ethics at Washington State University, said the united front by health professionals might force people to finally face the death penalty’s harsh realities.

Lethal injections had created a sterile setting for executions, he said.

“It’s like we’re not really executing. We’re sort of like taking Spot to the vet. We’re just putting him to sleep, and that’s not true,” he said.

Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, executive director of SumOfUs.org, an international corporate watchdog that has been campaigning for such a policy, said the American Pharmacists Association’s stance did not directly end lethal injection as a form of execution, “though that may well be the outcome”.