An unlikely candidate is at the center of a capital punishment debate: propofol, the anesthesia many physicians use to put patients under. Why? A shortage on the anesthetic drugs used for lethal injection caused state governments to look elsewhere for sedatives, the Scientific American reports.
Propofol, used up to 50 million times a year in US surgical procedures, has never been used in an execution. If the execution had gone ahead, US hospitals could have lost access to the drug because 90 percent of the U.S. supply is made and exported by a German company subject to European Union (EU) regulations that restrict the export of medicines and devices that could be used for capital punishment or torture. Fearing a ban on propofol sales to the United States, in 2012 the drug’s manufacturer, Fresenius Kabi in Bad Homburg, ordered its US distributors not to provide the drug to prisons.
In 2011, Hospira quit plans to make a different anesthetic in an Italian plant when the company had to agree the drug would never be used in executions, according to SA.
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“The European Union is serious,” David Lubarsky, head of the anesthesiology department at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine in Florida, told the magazine. “They’ve already shown that with thiopental. If we go down this road with propofol, a lot of good people who need anesthesia are going to be harmed. . . . Propofol has a lot of uses for which there are no substitutes.”
Plus, propofol is difficult to manufacture in the U.S. due to its regulatory climate, and proper use would likely require physicians to help administer the drugs. The issue has already caused at least one stay of execution.
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