A Man in India Is Selling States Illegally Imported Execution Drugs | Hacker News Reader

A Man in India Is Selling States Illegally Imported Execution Drugs

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58 pointscoloneltcb66 comments

> The drug Nebraska purchased, sodium thiopental, is an out-of-date anesthetic that stopped being used in executions after the sole FDA-approved manufacturer quit making it to keep it away from death penalty states.

In the recent climate of stories like pharmas price-gouging, it's nice to hear they aren't always greedy. (Edit: They were somewhat coerced by Italy, where they produce it[2]. I think EU export law forbids it now too. Still, they could probably produce it in the US at a worthwhile premium if they wanted to, but it appears they don't.)

> Other death penalty states have turned to different drugs, but Nebraska had few options because the state’s protocol calls for sodium thiopental.

I don't know how that came about, but it makes me wonder if this would be an effective way to weaken a law you don't like: compromise on a legal implementation that depends on something that won't last forever. I guess it's not unique, though; it's like how the debt ceiling is only bumped up a bit, or PATRIOT Act provisions extended a couple of years at a time.

> Changing it to a more modern execution drug would have required public meetings, and that would take time that Ricketts and his DOC did not have.

It sounds like Gov. Ricketts' ego and legacy rest on maintaining the death penalty in his state. The Atlantic[0] covered how the state legislature abolished it, and the multiple ways the government sought to twist law to do it anyway. The governor and his father personally financed $300k on a petition drive to suspend the new law[1]. Must be nice to have so much money and nothing better to do than try to obtain the right to legally kill strangers.

[0] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/a-govern... [1] http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/10/19/nebraska_d... [2] http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=175550&p=irol-ne...

The market for lethal drugs perhaps outweighs the regulatory costs.

Yeah, I wonder if somebody is working to obtain a new FDA license to sell at an even higher markup than the guy in the article. Nebraska's governor and his father already spent all that money to make it legal, maybe they'll give more to also buy the drugs or even finance the licensing.

What's sad about that is that there are plenty of lethal drugs that are perfectly legal and normally regulated, but they aren't part of the must-cause-pain execution method used. Terminally ill patients seeking medically assisted suicide take a lethal dose of a sleeping aide, which is pleasant.

> the must-cause-pain execution method

On the contrary: "cruel and unusual punishment" is Constitutionally prohibited in the US. Execution itself hasn't been ruled out by this, but it is not allowed to cause extreme pain. The dependence on certain drugs seems to be because of "conservatively" designing the execution protocol to a) consistently cause quick death, and b) not be painful, for instance by causing unconsciousness.

There is evidence that some convicts were conscious. On the other hand, I skimmed some euthanasia protocols[0], and to a layman at least, they appear similar to the ones for execution in the US, so I'm not sure you're correct about it being pleasant for the euthanasia patients. Perhaps the euthanasia one I read is outdated and they have better ones. I think we're less likely to hear about possibly-painful euthanasia experiences as we are about possibly-painful executions, though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lethal_injection#Euthanasia_pr...

I believe it is designed to cause pain and distress, because I've heard the designer of lethal injection say that's the point. Kinder methods were rejected because it was meant as a replacement for means like the electric chair, the gas chamber, and firing squads. It isn't meant to torture, but you aren't meant to drift softly into the night. The doc was on BBC Horizon (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7183957.stm). The alternative suggested there is oxygen deprivation via nitrogen.

Hopefully euthanasia patients will at least be monitored. They've struck me as more pleasant at least.

You are 100% wrong. Here is an interview with the guy you are talking about who came up with the lethal injection protocol 40 years ago. The specific intent was to be humane, and all it is an overdose of the standard anesthesia of the time.

http://time.com/101143/lethal-injection-creator-jay-chapman-...

You are correct. I deeply mixed up people. I was thinking of this interview with Robert Blecker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9YgWXKAwNY.

That it is failing and states haven't adjusted to something that might cause euphoria is in my view a bias to pain.

the must-cause-pain execution method

This is absolutely not true.

This is unfortunately not true. If you do some research into it, you'll discover that it's not easy for terminally ill patients to end their life. Contrary to what most people think, sleeping pills are not reliable, nor are many legal drugs. In many cases overdoses of these drugs leaves the person in an even worse state because they can cause severe distress, the body rejects them and vomits them out, they don't act quickly enough before the person is discovered and resuscitated. They can cause brain damage or physical damage without death. Terminally ill patients often aren't in good enough shape to even climb to the top of a building and throw themselves off. Like you said, it is extremely sad.

The drugs required for execution, on the other hand, are used because they appear to be the most reliable, peaceful and expedient method.

You can read more about it at http://www.peacefulpillhandbook.com/ - there are many terminally ill people who are trying to get their hands on these drugs.

That site doesn't seem to have publicly available info. But wouldn't mizadolam (just to calm you - any benzo I suppose) + a good dose of opiates (say, 1g of diamorphine for a naive user) work well? So long you like opiates (aren't one of those that gets really sick), it wouldn't be anything but amazing. And if you underdose, you just nod in and out for a while and try again (assuming no rescue).

If there are rescue teams coming in then I suppose that wouldn't work and you'd just wake up in Narcan hell. What are your choices then?

Apparently midazolam isn't a good choice, they tried it in combination with another drug during an execution and it took forever for the guy to die.

I'd suggest nitrogen asphyixiation. From what i've read, most folks who accidentally get exposed to 100% nitrogen atmospheres, don't even see it coming. Probably not that great for the execution witnesses as i'm sure you'd thrash about beforr dying.

It's being discussed. Oklahoma has legalized it as an alternate execution technique, and is reportedly considering using it if they can't acquire the necessary drugs for lethal injection (earlier this month, the execution of Richard Glossip was called off at the eleventh hour because of a drug screw-up). I'm not actually sure that you would thrash around at all, since there's no suffocation reflex -- according to Wikipedia, you pretty much just lose consciousness and that's that. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inert_gas_asphyxiation)

For the record, I think we should abolish the death penalty, so I'm not supporting this option, just sharing the data.

Well you don't need the midazolam at all. Enough morphine and you're good to go.

Passing out from breathing pure helium for too long is slightly pleasant and I imagine nitrogen would be similar. Though my friend said my foot was twitching. (I regained consciousness right when he figured out I wasn't joking around and had really passed out.)

In my misspent youth, I was once helping a friend with a project involving a couple of weather balloons full of helium. When he was done and we were cleaning up, I was playing around with breathing pure helium. One breath of pure helium was fine, and I followed it up with a second breath of pure helium, figuring I would feel hypoxia start to set in. It sets in fast and is actually euphoric. I remember saying "whoah" and realizing I was about to pass out, and I remember hearing my head hit the rubber floor I was sitting on. (I did sit down, since I realized there was a danger of my passing out.)

EDIT: I should point out that I used to be in favor of the death penalty, but now feel that it is usually little more than state-sponsored vengeance. I would like to see a cultural shift in America away from all forms of vengeance , and legitimizing vengeance against murders is worse than helping the families of murder victims realize that vengeance is neither necessary nor sufficient for closure.

If we as a society are determined to kill murderers, my experience suggests that breathing pure nitrogen would be one of the least barbaric ways to do so.

The private area of the site does go into just about every option you could imagine - various drug combinations, creating hoods for inhaling gas, jumping off a bridge, etc.

It pretty much comes down to the amount of risk the person wants to take that their attempt is a) successful b) quick and c) painless. Most people are afraid that they'll end up in a coma or severely brain damaged. Or if it is successful, people don't want their final moments to be gory with their head in a bag, vomiting profusely, thrashing around, etc.

I don't support the death penalty, but your comment about a "must-cause-pain execution method" seems completely off-base based on everything I've read. If you've kept up with the news, the argument is actually that the procedure MUST NOT cause pain to the condemned, and that's actually very hard to do while still ensuring death. The prototypical "three drug protocol" starts with a deep sedative that is supposed to render the person insensate (feeling no pain), then a paralytic to stop them from convulsing (the paralytic alone would actually cause death by asphyxiation in most cases), followed by potassium chloride which induces cardiac arrest.

If you wanted to kill someone painfully, you could just skip straight to the potassium chloride. It would burn like hell and they would have a massive heart attack while fully conscious.

Can you provide backing for your statement?

(Now that I'm off my phone...) my wording could have been better, but it is meant to be an anxiety provoking and harsh, similar to past methods, and there are some speculations on the drug. An overdose of anesthetic, sodium thiopental included. Many kinder methods would produce feelings of euphoria, and these methods are explicitly avoided. The second drug, the muscle relaxant, has been speculated to be more for the audience than the prisoner, and potassium chloride would be exceptionally painful if felt. The dosage of sodium thiopental has come under fire as being much too low, long before medication swaps and more blatant screw ups (https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7269-execution-by-inj...). I've read speculation that the anesthetics are really not a perfect block from the pain the body experiences, even if dosage is correct.

Perhaps the method wasn't meant to cause pain, but the method makes few attempts to avoid it, particularly when considering similar alternatives. That it shouldn't cause the condemned to feel like their body is on fire for several minutes seems like a far cry from "must not cause pain."

Worth mentioning that Hospira previously manufactured the drug in North Carolina. Blaming Italy and the EU is a little odd when they continue to have manufacturing located in the US that would not have to deal with such regulations.

According to the WSJ, it only generated $6MM in annual sales, which probably is not enough to a large company (even larger as it was acquired by Pfizer) to be associated with the death penalty.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527487047543045760959...

Thanks, I did read about North Carolina, but thought they'd completely shut down the plant there. So I guess they were forced to stop in NC due to production difficulties, canceled their plans again due to Italy/EU law, and then have never had sufficient reason to take the increasing PR hit and resumption costs for a relatively small market. And/or they genuinely decided to take a moral stance.

Sodium thiopental is not used in the U.S. anymore, but it’s still widely used in India and in parts of the developing world as an anesthetic.

That's not true. Sodium thiopental is still used in the US, the challenge is that the drug makers are refusing to sell it for executions.

I will never understand why people seem to think it is more humane to keep a man in a cage until he dies of old age than just to kill him and be done with it.

Given the choice between a reasonably-long prison sentence and euthanasia, I'd take the latter. I cannot imagine that I would want to meet the man I'd be after twenty years in 'the can', even in a rehabilitation-focused country, let alone the US.

Maybe Aaron had a point.

I'm sure this is true for some people. But humans tend to adapt their levels of happiness fairly rapidly, even when they predict they would be extremely unhappy. For instance, many paralyzed folks end up feeling not as bad as they would have thought. In a decent prison, it's quite plausible that you might adjust rather rapidly.

Still, forcing someone to continue to exist is cruel and they should have the option to opt-out, after a cool-down period and counseling and other safeguards.

What if you were innocent? Would you tell your lawyers to give up?

Because you might find out tomorrow that the person you killed was actually innocent. In contrast, if someone is freed after wrongly imprisoned for 3 years... at least that person is now free and alive. Even if it's 1/3000 people are actually innocent, that's enough reason not to use the death penalty. And even if the person is guilty, I'm not convinced killing someone is the correct punishment for any kind of crime except for some very rare extreme situations that I can't even think of right now.

Even worse is the people who complain that death row is "too expensive". It's expensive because prisoners get appeal after appeal! This is a good thing! Every chance to find some exculpating evidence is given. If nothing shows up in the 2+ decades you're on death row, nothing probably will.

If you get life in prison, you're only going to get a second chance if someone else actively confesses to the murder (and maybe not even then). Otherwise... they just throw away the key. How "humane".

If so, giving them the choice would be better no?

A surprisingly well written article, by buzzfeed standards. I always thought of buzzfeed as a clickbait silo, but that appears to have changed at some point.

Yeah it's looking like a well executed pivot.

A lot under their BuzzFeed News banner seems pretty well researched and written (in general, it's actual news)

They do still have plenty of clickbait stuff under their other sections, though.

From a Popular Mechanics article about how the New York Times works:

The Times is occasionally mocked for its staid and deliberate pace, but it is in moments like these that the seriousness with which it approaches every aspect of its operation becomes clearest. There are few organizations with the resources to spend such time and consideration on stories that aren't primed to go viral—though search-engine optimization and other tricks of the digital age do receive plenty of consideration.

When the conversation turns to a vivid story from Liberia, where Ebola has overtaken a particular neighborhood in Monrovia, one editor proudly reports that she believes the Times is the only outlet with a reporter on the ground, which makes everyone happy until another editor says, "I think BuzzFeed actually has somebody there." There is momentary silence.

The BuzzFeed News division is solid. There is a surprising amount of investigative journalism.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/news

Real question: First they had the electric chair, now exotic mixes of drugs. Whatever happened to the gallows? How come we have to do this (if we do actually need to do this... I don't know about that part) with fancy expensive tech?

Because we are a schizophrenic society. We don't know what we want.

* We want to rehabilitate but we also want to punish.

* We want to be humane but we also want to kill. So we keep switching around our methods until we got to these drug coctails. Which some first paralize the person, so when dosage is off, they could be in a horrible agony, but you know, they are not thrashing around making unpleasant sounds, so the sensibilities of those watching are not disturbed.

* We want to set an example, so others think twice about commiting heinous crimes, yet we don't televise or publisize executions. Heck, I am all for fishing or cutting bait. If we are going to be tough on crime and hope to scare the bejesus of future criminals by these harsh punishments, we should put them on evening news. You know, kids come home from school, everyone eats dinner, watch an execution (with frequent commercial breaks -- "Buy Tide! For a cleaner, fresher tomorrow"), and then everyone goes to bed.

* We say it is not about revenge and we use euphemisms like "justice" and "closure" instead, but it actually is about revenge.

The gallows has too many variables. Too short a rope, and you spend a few minutes asphyxiating. Too long a rope, and your head pops off. If the executioner makes a mistake, it's not humane anymore. If the executioner doesn't like you, he might intentionally "make a mistake".

It's theoretically more humane, and harder to screw up, to OD you on happy drugs. (It also looks more peaceful when one of those drugs is a paralytic.)

Oklahoma a few months ago introduced nitrogen asphyxiation as their backup plan. We know it's painless because a few people have accidentally entered nitrogen-heavy areas and didn't notice anything was wrong until they dropped unconscious (and were recovered before dying).

Because a) we are squeamish and b) execution is philosophically at odds with the rest of our carceral system. If you are interested in this issue and don't mind circuitous prose, Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish is a long-winded but extremely thought-provoking assessment of how and why penal strategies have shifted in western society over the past several centuries.

Or just a bullet to the back of the head. Execution in the US is downright odd - the endless delays, the ritual, the use of doctors... it's all sort of macabre.

Buzzfeed surprise aside, since the states are really in a bind on getting these drugs, it is in their interest to ask few questions and not look too closely at the answers. Which is pretty sad, the folks who have tried to prevent executions are at risk for making executions more gruesome by the state using drugs that aren't up to the task. I don't know if they can make this situation any worse.

Another solution: the states can stop killing people.

If the states can barely afford killing people, what makes you think they can afford to keep them in jail forever?

For one thing, capital punishment is more expensive than life imprisonment (which isn't keeping them in jail forever, because mortality.)

That's surprising to me. Bullets are cheap. What makes chemical executions so expensive?

The execution itself is not that expensive; what is expensive are the legal costs associated with the heightened scrutiny of capital cases.

Oh, I see. Thanks!

They seem to manage just fine jailing large amounts of people for pot possession and other non-violent crimes. If they were worried about costs, they wouldn't have been imprisoning like crazy for decades.

Are you talking about the richest nation on Earth?

Also, do you mean that it is Ok to kill a prisoner because it is too expensive to keep him alive?

Then that decision should be made in public by the elected representatives or by referendum in accordance with the state's laws, not by a tiny group of activists making it practically impossible via backdoor methods.

It's my understanding that the drug companies themselves, operating outside the US, are the ones making these drugs unavailable for death penalty use. They are engaging in a straightforward boycott.

Consider this: http://www.csg.org/pubs/capitolideas/enews/issue65_4.aspx

It really is creative activists trying things against the will of the people in those states that support capital punishment. I've got a complicated relationship with the death penalty, but that aside I recognize that the only way to change it is through the institutions we have which are empowered to make those changes.

If the "will of the people" is to have sodium thiopental injected into people, why don't the states in question build a plant of their own to manufacture the substance?

It's more a question of having a method codified into law than being stuck with that method. Instead of producing the drugs the states in question will probably just switch to another method of execution.

It really is, but why shouldn't they? The people who express a preference in favor of the death penalty are entitled to their attitudes, but not to freedom from political opposition.

Drug companies are boycotting the death penalty process because of their deep-seated moral convictions? I don't think so.

Corporations are amoral. The activists found a weak point in the death penalty system -- namely, the companies which make the drugs (which is a small market to start with) and are terrified of even the remotest smidgen of public criticism.

But that would be a miscarriage of justice. To leave the men responsible for, say, robbing and stabbing to death five people at a quiet bar is grotesque.

(Yes, it's also a miscarriage of justice to wrongly execute the innocent—and to wrongly imprison the innocent, and to fail to execute those guilty of certain crimes)

Many of us believe that killing is never justice, whether it's committed by the state or not.

> To leave the men responsible for, say, robbing and stabbing to death five people at a quiet bar is grotesque.

And how would killing again unstab those 5 and bring them back from the dead?

How would caging the murderers like animals for the next fifty years unstab those 5 and bring them back from the dead? I don't see how yours is a relevant objection.

Not killing a killer would be miscarriage of revenge, not a miscarriage of justice.

Punitive justice is petty.

Assuming we're okay with killing our prisoners, I don't see what's so wrong with death by firing squad. It's cheap, fast, painless, and can be carried out by people who have little training. If you don't want to see the condemned person's discomfort, you could still sedate them just as they do with lethal injection. Maybe death by firing squad doesn't make for as exciting theatrics as the complex and methodical procedures of lethal injection, but I'm sure we could come up with something for the audience. And if that's unpalatable for lawmakers... Maybe we should reconsider the whole thing.

Is gunshot-induced heart failure, along with a dozen gunshot wounds in the chest area, really painless?

> Maybe death by firing squad doesn't make for as exciting theatrics as the complex and methodical procedures of lethal injection, but I'm sure we could come up with something for the audience.

It would be more theatrical than lethal injection, which I think it part of the reason its avoided. Lethal injection medicalizes the death penalty and makes it seem less like actually killing someone.

My thought was that the whole procedure of it, with the needles and the sheet and the doctors and everything was what made it "theatrical." I feel like the ordeal is a lot more honest when a bunch of people with rifles shoot somebody in the chest. Nobody gets to feel like it's anything other than a killing.

A sentiment echoed by Federal Appeals Court judge Alex Kozinski[1].

"If we as a society want to carry out executions, we should be willing to face the fact that the state is committing a horrendous brutality on our behalf."

[1] http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-na-nn-arizona-executio...

Even the current way is just terrifying. Being strapped down and injected? I'd prefer getting loaded with something like quetiapine over the preceding week to sorta numb me out. Perhaps some opiates, too. Then fill the cell with inert gas or something.

Actually, they should give prisoners the option to self-inflict, via overdose or something.

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