Arizona, Texas Attempted to Import Illegal Lethal Injection Drugs Linked to Indian Supplier with Troubling History

Arizona and Texas attempt­ed to import lethal injec­tion drugs in vio­la­tion of fed­er­al law, but the ship­ments were halt­ed by U.S. Food and Drug Administration offi­cials in late July, accord­ing to reports by The Arizona Republic and Buzzfeed. The Republic reports that the Arizona Department of Corrections paid $27,000 for sodi­um thiopen­tal for use in exe­cu­tions, but the ship­ment was halt­ed at the Phoenix air­port by U.S. Food and Drug Administration offi­cials. BuzzFeed reports that on the same date, the FDA halt­ed a sec­ond ship­ment of sodi­um thiopen­tal from the same ship­per at the Houston air­port. This sec­ond ship­ment was bound for the Texas prisons. 

Though Arizona had redact­ed the sell­er’s name and infor­ma­tion from the doc­u­ments obtained by The Republic, the offer of sale is iden­ti­cal to an offer sent to Nebraska from Harris Pharma, a drug sup­pli­er in India. 

Sodium thiopen­tal was wide­ly used as the first drug in exe­cu­tions until the sole U.S. man­u­fac­tur­er halt­ed pro­duc­tion in 2011 over con­cerns about the pro­duc­t’s use in exe­cu­tions. Chris Harris, the own­er of Harris Pharma, has sold exe­cu­tion drugs to Nebraska, Ohio, and South Dakota, and approached the Idaho Department of Corrections, though that sale fell through. A BuzzFeed inves­ti­ga­tion found that the office in which Harris claims to man­u­fac­ture the drugs is not equipped to make drugs, rais­ing the ques­tion of where the drugs are actu­al­ly being produced. 

Earlier this year, Nebraska paid Harris $54,400 for exe­cu­tion drugs that Federal Express refused to bring into the coun­try because they lacked import approval from the FDA.

In 2011, Harris sold Nebraska sodi­um thiopen­tal from Naari, a Swiss-based phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­ny, telling the man­u­fac­tur­er that he was send­ing the drug to Africa, where it is still wide­ly used as an anes­thet­ic. Upon learn­ing that their prod­uct had been pur­chased for use in exe­cu­tions, Naari sued the state of Nebraska. 

Harris has recent­ly required states to make a min­i­mum order of 1,000 vials of sodi­um thiopen­tal, charg­ing as much as sev­en times the usu­al cost per vial. He has con­tin­ued to promise states that he has reg­u­la­to­ry clear­ance to send them the drugs, even though the FDA has been under court order to stop all ship­ments of sodi­um thiopen­tal into the U.S. since 2013.