Nevada’s execution of a man convicted of murder was halted on Wednesday, after the manufacturer of one of the drugs that was to be used in the lethal injection argued that the state had obtained its product illicitly.

A district court judge issued a temporary restraining order preventing Nevada officials from using the drug in the execution. It was the first time that a pharmaceutical manufacturer has been able to stop an execution — at least temporarily. It is likely to intensify the battle between officials in death-penalty states and drugmakers that object to their products being used to kill inmates.

Nevada had planned to use three drugs in the execution of Scott Dozier, who has been on death row since 2007: one as a sedative, one to paralyze him, and the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl to help kill him. The execution would have been the first to use fentanyl, which kills thousands of Americans every year and is at the forefront of the nation’s overdose crisis.

The potential use of commonly abused narcotics like fentanyl in executions has alarmed human-rights organizations. They fear that prison officials in death-penalty states, facing objections from pharmaceutical companies, will turn to the black market to obtain those narcotics, bolstering trafficking networks at the same time authorities are desperately trying to curb them.