Drug Company? Driving School? It's All the Same in the Lethal Injection Business
To get lethal injection drugs for executions, Arizona officials bought them from a drug company that operates out of the back of a driving school in London, according to an invoice and email correspondence from the state. The company, Dream Pharma, operates a web site riddled with typos and carries the motto, "Dedicated to the healthcare of the public." (Its partially boarded up office is shown here on Google Street View.)
The good news is that U.S. pharmaceutical companies are currently declining to provide American prisons with those drugs. Their products aren't approved for deliberately killing people, and the "market" -- if you can call it that -- for lethal injections is so tiny as to be not worth bothering with. Why should companies risk their reputations by supplying drugs that have legitimate non-lethal medical uses to be given in overdose form?
The documents, obtained under Freedom of Information laws by the ACLU and the BBC, describe the efforts of the Arizona state prison system to obtain sodium thiopental and other drugs to execute convicted murderer Jeffrey Landrigan. Another company used by Arizona was Link Pharmaceuticals of Horsham, England, according to page 3 of this set of documents. Link is based in this small office building (right), according to Google's Street View.
The documents -- mostly emails between Arizona prison officials discussing an increasingly desperate search to find thiopental -- show how tawdry and medically unsupervised the act of procuring drugs for executions is:
- Arizona had to buy in bulk from Dream, purchasing enough to carry it through until 2014.
- Dream shares a tiny office in Acton, London, with the Elgone Driving Academy. The school's name is a pun on the phrase "L gone," which refers to the L-plates all drivers must use while they are learning to drive.
- Arizona then shared some of its supply with California for the execution of convicted murderer Albert Greenwood Brown. It was that transaction that led to an email exchange in which Calfornia's prison undersecretary told an Arizona official, "You guys in AZ are life savers ... Buy you a beer next time I get that way."
- Drugs are so scarce that Oklahoma recently used Pfizer (PFE)'s pentobarbital, a pet euthenasia drug, to execute a prisoner.
- Arizona contacted "80-90 hospitals" in its attempts to find thiopental, according to page 6 of this document set, after Hospira (HSP) said in September 2010 that it would no longer allow its products to be used for death sentences.
- The emails -- and Dream's web site -- show that the company was willing to supply four years' worth of lethal injections to Arizona after receiving little more than an email request, a Fedex address and a check for £4,528.
- Currently, no U.S. company is willing to supply drugs for executions, according to page 50 of this document set.
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