Hospira has been rejected license to produce death penalty drugs

Sodium thiopental is an anesthetic drug that has one manufacturer, Hospira. Italy has rejected the application Hospira submitted to manufacture the narcotic. Germany has also disallowed export of the drug. Because of this denial of a permit to manufacture, several states are going through a shortage of the death penalty drug. Source for this article – No license to manufacture means death penalty drug shortage by Newsytype.com.

Germany and Italy deny Hospira a permit to produce

The only manufacturer of sodium thiopental is Hospira. It’s the only company allowed to do so. The business applied for a license to manufacture the drug in Italy. Unless Hospira could make sure the narcotic never got put in lethal injection cocktails, the Italian government said Hospira would never get a permit. All U.S. requests for the drug may be rejected due to a request from the German Medical Association. Since Hospira cannot get a license to manufacture the drug, the business may have to stop production entirely.

Running out of the narcotic used for the death penalty

Now that Hospira has been denied a permit to manufacture sodium thiopental, there is a death penalty substance shortage. The amount of sodium thiopental that states have is in limited supply. In fact, states do not have enough of it to execute all those on death row. The British government has also banned all exports of sodium thiopental, meaning that there is no legal source of the substance. The scarcity started to appear past year. A wholesaler in Britain sold it illegally to Arizona and California. The death penalty has been banned in all European Union nations since at least 2008.

Sodium thiopental replacement drug

A sodium thiopental replacement drug is something most states are looking into with the death penalty substance scarcity. The barbiturate narcotic Pentobarbital is being looked at. It’s manufactured within the U.S. and has the very same effects. Three executions in Ohio have had the substitute narcotic used already. Doctor-assisted suicide is what pentobarbital is used for in OR. State supreme courts have judged it as "humane" already.

Information from

The Guardian

guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/23/lethal-injection-sodium-thiopental-hospira

MSNBC

msnbc.msn.com/id/41233372/ns/health-health_care/