Texas officials filed a federal lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration Tuesday following a 17-month stand-off with the agency over the legality of imported drugs the state intended to use for lethal injections.

In July of 2015, Texas imported 1,000 vials of thiopental sodium, a barbiturate anesthetic that ensures rapid loss of consciousness when given in lethal cocktails. According to the court documents (PDF), the drugs came from an unnamed “foreign distributor." (However, Buzzfeed has reported they were from a questionable source in India.) At the request of the FDA, the drugs were seized by Customs officials upon their arrival at the airport. Later, the FDA said that the drugs were not approved for use in the US and were improperly labeled. Texas appealed, arguing that because the drugs would be used by law enforcement, they met an exception to federal regulations. The FDA responded by notifying the state that it was tentatively barred from importing the drug.

In this week’s lawsuit, Texas reasserts its “law enforcement exemption” claim. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was openly frustrated with the FDA’s interference. In a press release, Paxton said:

“There are only two reasons why the FDA would take 17 months to make a final decision on Texas’ importation of thiopental sodium: gross incompetence or willful obstruction. The FDA has an obligation to fulfill its responsibilities faithfully and in a timely manner. My office will not allow the FDA to sit on its hands and thereby impair Texas’ responsibility to carry out its law enforcement duties.”

The FDA declined to comment on the lawsuit.

In recent years, Texas and other states with the death penalty have scrambled to get drugs for lethal injections. This is in part due to the European Union’s disapproval of the death penalty and their ban on exporting drugs for that purpose. Also, drug makers themselves don’t want their products involved in the process. For instance, in 2011, Hospira, the sole US manufacturer of thiopental sodium, stopped making the drug because it wanted out of the lethal injection business. The company initially planned to make the drug in Italy, but the Italian government expressed concern about the drug's potential use in capital punishment.

Meanwhile, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice has switched to using a different drug, called pentobarbital, another barbiturate used by most other states for lethal injections. That drug has also had supply and access issues, and Texas has not said where it's currently getting the drug. However, a spokesperson for the department told the Washington Post that the state has enough to carry out all its planned executions.

Likewise, the spokesperson said that the FDA’s seizure of thiopental sodium did not prevent the state from carrying out any executions.

Advocates and some medical experts fear the use of alternative drug cocktails and drugs from secret—possibly untrustworthy—sources, because they could lead to more “botched” and inhumane executions. However, even executions done precisely to protocol may be inhumane. A 2005 analysis in the Lancet found that execution protocols in some states weren’t performed by properly trained medical professionals and didn’t include enough anesthetic.