LONDON — Virtually all European countries ban capital punishment, and the European Union has been a leader in the effort to ban it worldwide. But that has not stopped European companies from contributing to the active death penalty machine in the United States through the supply of drugs used in lethal injections.
A Danish pharmaceutical company, Lundbeck, has become the latest to supply a drug to U.S. death penalty states — Ohio used it to put a man to death two weeks ago, and Texas is planning to use it in an execution scheduled for April 5.
That has put the medium-size company in the cross hairs of death penalty opponents. In the last six months, these forces have succeeded in stopping Italian and British companies from exporting lethal injection drugs to the United States.
A Lundbeck spokesman said the company was shocked when it learned recently that its drug, pentobarbital, was being used in executions. “This is fully against what we stand for,” the spokesman, Anders Schroll, said by telephone. “We are in the business of improving people’s lives.” He said that the drug had legitimate uses in controlling epilepsy and that the company had no control over how the drugs were used once the company sold them to its distributors in the United States.
Reprieve, a human rights organization in Britain, has led the campaign to stop European companies from selling lethal injection drugs to the United States. It called Lundbeck’s position “extremely disappointing.”
Lethal injection has been adopted by all the U.S. states that have the death penalty, although some also permit other methods.
The general procedure in most states is for the condemned to be strapped onto a gurney and wheeled into the execution chamber. The condemned person’s arms are swabbed with alcohol, and two intravenous tubes are inserted, one in each arm.
From another room, the executioners first release sodium thiopental, a general anesthesia, into the tubes. (In surgery, 100 to 150 milligrams are used; for executions, as much as 5,000 milligrams.) This is followed by a muscle relaxant, which paralyzes the diaphragm and lungs. Finally, potassium chloride may be injected, causing death by cardiac arrest.
The use of foreign-supplied sodium thiopental, and the surrounding controversy, has arisen because the U.S. company that manufactured thiopental, Hospira, ceased production at its plant in North Carolina.
Initially, Hospira was going to import the drug from its plant in Milan, but under pressure from death penalty opponents, the Italian government demanded that Hospira guarantee the drug would not be used in executions. Hospira said it could not make that guarantee.
Death penalty states found a British supplier, Dream Pharma, a small wholesaler that operated out of the back room of a driving school in West London. Demonstrating that this is a lucrative business, the company swiftly raised prices for the drug, which it sold to six states. The British drug has been used in three executions.
Dream Pharma’s managing director, Matt Alavi, declined to answer any questions when reached by telephone. “I have no comment, have a nice day,” he said.
Reprieve filed a lawsuit to ban the exportation of thiopental for use in executions. The British government responded that the death penalty states would simply buy it elsewhere. But shortly after, the government effectively prohibited the export as Reprieve had requested.
Pharmaceutical companies in Austria and Germany also make the drug, but the governments of both countries have recently warned companies not to sell their drugs for executions in the United States, according to a spokeswoman for Reprieve, Katherine O’Shea.
Austria has pledged to work with other European countries to prohibit the export of all drugs to the United States for use in executions, a senior Austrian official wrote in a letter to Bianca Jagger, who met him in Vienna on behalf of Reprieve. Such a ban would be consistent with E.U. bans on “certain goods which could be used for capital punishment, torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” said the official, Helmut Tichy.
He said that the government had appealed publicly to Sandoz, which makes thiopental, not to sell it for use by executioners in the United States, and that the company had agreed not to do so.
Now that obtaining sodium thiopental is becoming more difficult, death penalty states are switching to pentobarbital, the drug manufactured by Lundbeck. Some states plan to use it as an anesthetic in lieu of sodium thiopental. In other states, it will be used alone, as an alternative to the three-drug cocktail.
Lundbeck’s pentobarbital has been sold to Ohio, Oklahoma, Mississippi and Texas, said Mr. Schroll, the company spokesman.
Earlier this month, representatives from Reprieve and a prominent U.S. death penalty lawyer, Joseph Margulies, met with Lundbeck officials. They asked the company to put a provision into their contracts with their U.S. distributors that the drug could not be resold to any state for execution purposes. Mr. Schroll said the distributors would not sign such restrictive contracts.
Sales of pentobarbital in the United States account for less than 1 percent of the company’s total revenues, Mr. Scholl said. Given that, Mr. Margulies countered: “They should not allow their modest profit from the drug to make them complicit in capital punishment.”
Mr. Schroll said that the company was in a very uncomfortable situation. Most of Lundbeck’s employees are against the death penalty, he said. Denmark itself has not had a civilian execution since 1882.