For the past three-and-a-half years, Texas has pur­chased exe­cu­tion drugs from a Houston-based com­pound­ing phar­ma­cy that, BuzzFeed News reports, ​“has been cit­ed for scores of safe­ty vio­la­tions” and whose license to oper­ate is cur­rent­ly on pro­ba­tion. In an exclu­sive sto­ry by inves­tiga­tive reporter Chris McDaniel, BuzzFeed dis­cov­ered that Texas secret­ly obtained exe­cu­tion drugs from the Greenpark Compounding Pharmacy, a phar­ma­cy that the Texas State Board of Pharmacy has cit­ed for 48 vio­la­tions in the past eight years, includ­ing ​“keep­ing out-of-date drugs in stock, using improp­er pro­ce­dures to pre­pare IV solu­tions, and inad­e­quate clean­ing of hands and gloves.” 

Greenpark’s license was put on pro­ba­tion in November 2016 after it botched a pre­scrip­tion for three chil­dren, send­ing one of them to the hos­pi­tal for emer­gency care. Instead of pro­vid­ing the chil­dren lan­so­pra­zole, a drug to treat high lev­els of stom­ach acid, the phar­ma­cy gave them lorazepam, an anti-anx­i­ety drug sim­i­lar to Xanax. A phar­ma­cy tech­ni­cian was found to have forged qual­i­ty-con­trol doc­u­ments relat­ing to the inci­dent. Two hun­dred com­pound­ing phar­ma­cies are cur­rent­ly licensed in Texas, and Greenpark is one of only eight whose license is on pro­ba­tion or revoked.

The dis­cov­ery of Greenpark’s taint­ed safe­ty his­to­ry comes in the wake of sug­ges­tions by med­ical experts that the drugs used in recent Texas exe­cu­tions may have been out­dat­ed or impure. The last words of five of the eleven pris­on­ers exe­cut­ed in Texas so far in 2018 indi­cat­ed that they expe­ri­enced burn­ing after the exe­cu­tion drug, pen­to­bar­bi­tal, was inject­ed. Pentobarbital, an anes­thet­ic, is intend­ed to pro­duce a pain­less exe­cu­tion. In January, as the state exe­cut­ed Anthony Shore, he called out, ​“I can feel that it does burn. Burning!” Juan Castillo, Troy Clark, Christopher Young, and Danny Bible all said the drug burned or hurt dur­ing their exe­cu­tions. A sixth pris­on­er, William Rayford, was observed writhing and shak­ing on the gur­ney after the drug injec­tion. Dr. David Waisel, an anes­the­si­ol­o­gist and Harvard Medical School pro­fes­sor, wrote in a 2016 affi­davit, ​“Improper com­pound­ing and test­ing pro­ce­dures may leave fine par­ti­cles unde­tectable by the naked eye in the solu­tion, or larg­er par­ti­cles that would not be detect­ed by an untrained eye. These par­ti­cles can cause great irri­ta­tion to the vein, result­ing in extraordinary pain.”

Both Texas and Greenpark sought to keep the pharmacy’s iden­ti­ty secret, but BuzzFeed obtained doc­u­ments show­ing that Texas sent the com­pound­ing phar­ma­cy the raw ingre­di­ents for pen­to­bar­bi­tal in April 2015 and February 2016. In June 2018, Greenpark sub­mit­ted a dec­la­ra­tion in a lethal-injec­tion suit, using the pseu­do­nym ​“Pharmacy X,” stat­ing that its ​“deci­sion to sup­ply the Texas Department of Criminal Justice with lethal injec­tion chem­i­cals was and is con­tin­gent on Pharmacy X’s iden­ti­ty remain­ing secret.” The dec­la­ra­tion assert­ed that ​“Pharmacy X will no longer con­duct busi­ness with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice” if its iden­ti­ty is dis­closed or revealed.

On November 20, a Death Penalty Information Center report warned of poten­tial dan­gers asso­ci­at­ed with state efforts to con­ceal the iden­ti­ty of com­pound­ing phar­ma­cies who pro­vid­ed exe­cu­tion drugs. When the iden­ti­ties of secret drug com­pounders have been revealed in the past, the pub­lic learned that Missouri had car­ried out sev­en­teen exe­cu­tions between 2014 and 2017 using drugs secret­ly obtained from a sub­ur­ban St. Louis com­pound­ing phar­ma­cy, Foundation Care, that the Food and Drug Administration had clas­si­fied as ​“high risk” because of repeat­ed seri­ous health vio­la­tions, and from a Tulsa com­pounder, The Apothecary Shoppe, that was not licensed to sell drugs in Missouri and had admit­ted to near­ly 2,000 health and safety violations.

(Chris McDaniel, Inmates Said The Drug Burned As They Died. This Is How Texas Gets Its Execution Drugs., BuzzFeed News, November 28, 2018.) See Lethal Injection. Read DPIC’s report on secre­cy, Behind the Curtain: Secrecy and the Death Penalty in the United States.

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