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The Apothecary Shoppe, a compounding pharmacy in Tulsa, Okla., will not sell Missouri pentobarbital, a drug necessary for the state to perform an execution.
After the pharmacy was named in a lawsuit filed by death row inmate Michael Taylor, who alleged the prescription drug could cause severe and inhumane pain, the pharmacy agreed to stop selling the drug to the Missouri Department of Corrections.
More and more compounding pharmacies have come to the conclusion that supplying lethal drugs is not worth the publicity, along with the legal and ethical risks that follow.
Kris Miller, professor of biology, said that pentobarbital is a drug that stops a person’s heart and respiratory function when given in high doses. He stated that there are other lethal injection protocols that do not require pentobarbital, so it is not required for executions.
“I am personally against capital punishment,” Miller said. “My alternative would be to abolish the death penalty and replace executions with prison sentences commiserate with the crime committed.”
Miller said it costs considerably more to sentence a convicted felon to death, pay for appeals until exhausted and then carry out the sentence than it does to incarcerate a prisoner for life.
“A better use of our money as a people would be to invest in public education, mental health care, as well as drug prevention and treatment,” Miller said. “Investing in our young peoples’ education and the mental and physical well being of our citizenry would probably have a greater impact on violent crime rates, as well as providing for more economic opportunity.”
Senior Mark Street said this drug is not necessary in executions, but due to the growing scarcity of drugs used solely for executions, states often seek after it. The root of this problem is not finding an alternative drug, according to Street, but finding pharmacies that are willing to give any potential lethal drug with the intent of killing the patient.
“The best and most humane alternative, if killing a human could be called humane, would be to administer the traditional three-drug cocktail [which includes] a sedative, a paralytic and a component used to stop the heart,” Street said. “However, many medical companies have stopped selling these drugs for ethical and reputation reasons, so less humane and untested execution drugs are currently being used.”
Miller said that the state may have legal standing to use the aforementioned drug for executions, but this pharmacy has taken a moral stand that should be respected. He said this case has a similar context to the Hobby Lobby case that recently circulated the federal appeals courts, which states that the federal government cannot impose regulations on private business that violate an individual or corporation’s personal ethics.
Senior Cooper Denton said that pharmacies do not care about ethics; pharmaceutical companies are among the most powerful conglomerates in the modern world and only pursue their bottom line.
“Pharmaceuticals such as opiates are a leading cause of dependency among Americans,” Denton said. “Heroin was invented by Bayer and originally marketed as a cough syrup. So for a pharmacy to claim ethics in this case speaks more about who is in their pocketbook than who is actually concerned about ethics. So I guess my answer is no, they did not make the right choice, because when it comes down to it they have no regard for the criminal’s well being.”
Capital punishment is meant to be a deterrent carried out under strict guidelines according to Miller, with safeguards to protect the wrongly convicted.
“Capital punishment is not intended to be some sort of state sponsored revenge,” Miller said. “My family has experienced the tremendous pain felt when close family members are brutally murdered in cold blood … but the execution of the individuals that committed those awful crimes would do nothing to bring back our cousins.”
Street said that paying violence back with violence does not fix the problem, and killing a criminal does not undo the crime.
“If our country persists in capital punishment, it must do so in the most humane way possible to prevent our justice system from being deemed criminal,” Street said.
Denton offered that they should have the same punishment levied onto them as they levied onto their victims. He raised the question of whether institutionalizing a criminal and altering his or her mindset is ethical or not.
“Personally as a taxpayer, I would much rather see a criminal put to death than to pay $22,000 per year to let them rot in jail,” Denton said. “Until we find a better alternative for humanely putting criminals to death, which is utterly impossible, we might as well continue down the road we are on.”
Miller said there is a growing debate in the U.S. about the effectiveness of capital punishment as a deterrent, and the legality of lethal injection in regards to cruel and unusual punishment. Additionally, many in the health care, pharmaceutical and legal professions have concerns regarding the execution of wrongly convicted individuals and participation in the state sponsored taking of life on moral grounds.
“It is time for Christians to join the debate,” Miller said. “We would do well to remember the words of Christ at Golgotha, ‘Father, forgive them.’”
If lethal injection is still to be the main form of capital punishment, Street emphasized new systems must be enacted in order to provide more painless and humane execution drugs while protecting the secrecy of the supplier.
“Otherwise the executions may prove more gruesome and the medicinal business deals more shady,” Street said.
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