Another drug used by US executioners just got the chop. Pharmaceutical firm Lundbeck of Copenhagen, Denmark, has announced that it will not sell pentobarbital to prisons in US states where the death penalty is legal.
Pentobarbital is an anaesthetic used to sedate condemned prisoners before two further drugs stop their breathing and heartbeat. Lundbeck said it was .
The firm will now only supply pentobarbital through a specialist pharmacy that will distribute it to company-approved hospitals and treatment centres. The drug is , says the American Epilepsy Society.
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Low supplies
Lundbeck鈥檚 decision comes six months after US-based firm said it would no longer manufacture sodium thiopental, an anaesthetic that has also been used in lethal injections. In response, several states which have the death penalty .
Supplies for executions will start to run out. Pentobarbital is a generic drug, however, so others could make it. 鈥淲e expected generic competition a long time ago,鈥� says Lundbeck spokesman Mads Vindahl Kronborg.
Jason Clark, a public information officer at the (TDCJ), which replaced sodium thiopental with pentobarbital in March this year, says: 鈥淭he agency has an adequate supply of the drug to carry out executions that have been or may be scheduled.鈥�
Texas has executed more people than any other state since the death penalty was reinstated in the US in 1976. The TDCJ has . 鈥淲e will continue to monitor the situation closely,鈥� says Clark.
When this article was first posted it incorrectly stated that Lundbeck was based in the Netherlands
