fentanyl

Nebraska executes inmate using Fentanyl

October 17, 2018 by lloyd payne

Despite being sued by a pharmaceutical company for alleged unauthorized use, the state of Nebraska was successful in executing a prisoner on death row using the addictive drug fentanyl, according to NPR News. Robert Dunham, head of the Death Penalty Information Center, believed the use of fentanyl—the first execution in the country using the chemical—was unusual.
“It’s somewhat ironic that at the same time the Justice Department and states are talking about how dangerous fentanyl is and how it’s created a national public health emergency that states are now turning to it as a supposedly safe way of killing prisoners,” Dunham said told NPR. Convicted of murder in 1980, Carey Dean Moore was sentenced to death and did not put up a legal fight against being injected with a lethal dose of the deadly opiate.

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But Fresenius Kabi, a German pharmaceutical company, challenged Moore’s execution in federal court according to NPR News.
Fresenius Kabi are the makers of potassium chloride and cisatracurium besylate, two of the four drugs used in the state’s execution cocktail, and filed a suit requesting that a temporary restraining order be granted on the grounds that the state of Nebraska may have purchased those drugs illegally.
The company commented that its drugs are only sold by authorized dealers who “contractually agreed to particular constraints, such as excluding sale to federal or state incarceration facilities.”
Nebraska has been vocal about the debate over the use of the two drugs in Moore’s execution. The state said after contacting a number of potential suppliers and six different states, the drug was supplied by a licensed pharmacy in the United States. Nebraska authorities claim that the drug was not obtained by fraud, deceit or misrepresentation.
Judge Richard Kopf denied the restraining order. He stated the claim that the drugs’ use would cause the company “irreparable injury” was “far too speculative,” allowing the state of Nebraska to complete the execution.
NET News reported that there have also been concerns by death-penalty abolitionists about the drug cisatracurium besylate, which causes paralysis.
“If in tortuous pain the paralysis would make the subject unable to respond,” NET News summarized.
Moore was given the first drug at 10:24 a.m. and pronounced dead by 10:47 a.m., according to the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services.
The Associated Press reported that while on the gurney, Moore turned his head and mouthed several words to his family, including “I love you.”
His execution was under heavy scrutiny by the ACLU Nebraska chapter.
“This execution of Carey Dean Moore does not comport with Nebraska’s proud tradition of open government,” director Danielle Conrad said to NPR. She also said it stood as the most dark chapter in Nebraska’s troubled history with the death penalty. The state had not executed an inmate since 1997.
PPI’s “Correctional Control: Incarceration and Supervision by State” is the first report to aggregate data on all types of correctional control nationwide.

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Fentanyl more lethal than other opioids

October 17, 2018 by lloyd payne

Deaths related to the opioid fentanyl tripled in California between 2016 and 2017, according to a new report.
“We’re really on high alert,” Rachael Kagan, spokeswoman for the San Francisco Department of Health, told Soumya Karlamangla of the Los Angeles Times.
Fentanyl has historically been less present in California than other parts of the United States. Experts say that’s because most heroin sold in California is black tar heroin, which is harder to mix with fentanyl, while white powder heroin is more popular on the East Coast, the Times reported May 15.
Recently, the drug has started to show up in cocaine and meth sold in California. Fentanyl is 50 times more potent than heroin and is often mixed into other street drugs to produce a more powerful high. Its presence in non-opioids has experts worried California may be headed toward a deadly crisis.
Three Hispanic men were recently found dead of drug overdoses in an apartment in downtown Los Angeles, the newspaper reported. The coroner’s report stated they had been doing what they believed was cocaine when they died. However, it is suspected that the men accidentally consumed fentanyl as well, according to Dr. Gary Tsai, medical director of the Los Angeles County Health Department’s substance abuse prevention and control division.
“Cocaine, while it can be life-threatening, generally doesn’t result in instantaneous overdose deaths like that,” Tsai said.
According to the Times article, recently several people have also died in San Francisco from ingesting fentanyl with methamphetamine, counterfeit Xanax and crack cocaine. Reports from elsewhere have found fentanyl in the rave drug MDMA.
In the last year alone, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has made seizures of cocaine with fentanyl, methamphetamine with it or ketamine throughout Southern and Central California, according to Timothy Massino, a spokesman for the DEA in Los Angeles.
“This is a fairly new phenomenon in this area,” Massino told the Times.
Arron Barba, director of the Venice Family Clinic Common Ground in Los Angeles, provides drug users with test strips to check for fentanyl.
“There’s no quality control, and there’s no government to step in and say you can’t do that,” she told the Times. “People can’t tell what’s in the drugs they’re buying, and it’s clear fentanyl is increasingly part of the equation.”Tsai and other experts said that while fentanyl-contaminated street drugs are a real and growing threat, they’re not California’s most urgent public health issue.
But Maynor Garcia, whose brother was one of the three men that died in Los Angeles, told the Times he wished there were more public awareness about the risk in party drugs in the city.
“I’m not encouraging people to do cocaine, but people do,” he said, “and then those people that do it … need to understand that it could be lethal.”
PPI’s “Correctional Control: Incarceration and Supervision by State” is the first report to aggregate data on all types of correctional control nationwide.

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http://sanquentinnews.com/prisons-testing-new-drug-to-combat-opioid-addictions/

States seeking lethal injection cocktails from black market

–By Lloyd Payne

States seeking lethal injection cocktails from black market

May 8, 2018 by John Lam

Lethal injection chair in Texas’ Huntsville Penitentiary

Some states have turned to the black market to obtain scarce lethal injection drugs that have caused botched executions, according to www.Reason.com.

According to the report by C.J. Ciaramella, investigative journalists found that, “these states have turned to untraceable cash transactions, unregulated pharmacies, and overseas scammers to buy drugs to fill the veins of condemned inmates.”

Some experimental combinations have even resulted in botched executions.

Further complicating the matter, Virginia and 14 other states have passed secrecy laws that may hide the identities of pharmacies that provide death penalty drugs.

“Even in the cocaine and crack days, people didn’t die like this.” THE WALL STREET JOURNAL 12-18-17 Cmdr. Thomas Fallon of Hamilton County, Ohio on opioid epidemic.

“Officials argue such secrecy keeps the flow of necessary drugs unimpeded—but it also leaves death row inmates, their lawyers, the press, and the public in the dark about how governments are wielding the gravest of their powers,” Ciaramella reported.

Some other findings:

In an attempt to avoid leaving a paper trail, an Oklahoma state official drove across state lines and purchased execution drugs from a pharmacy using petty cash.

Despite a U.S. Food and Drug Administration ban on importing sodium thiopental, the active ingredient in executions, three states paid an India company, Harris Pharma, run by a man with no pharmaceutical background, to send the drugs to them.

More than one-third of the national’s 9 percent increase in homicides occurred in Chicago. “Homicides Are a Neighborhood Problem” THE NEW YORK TIMES 12-28-17

Nebraska ordered $54,000 worth of the drug from Harris—enough to perform 300 executions. The FDA confiscated the shipment, leaving Nebraskan taxpayers on the hook.

Due to the difficulty of obtaining Midazolam and sodium thiopental. Nebraska is looking into using a never-before-tried mix of four drugs: diazepam (Valium), potassium chloride, cisatracurium besylate (a paralytic, banned for animal euthanasia) and fentanyl citrate, the super-strong opiate responsible for a wave of overdoses in the U.S.

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Nevada plans to use execute using combination of unproven drugs

October 1, 2017 by Charles David Henry

Nevada plans to use a combination of drugs for an execution that has never been used and its effectiveness is unproven, an investigative Global News story reports.

Despite the growing opioid epidemic plaguing a large number of U.S. and Canadian communities, Nevada Department of Corrections wants to use fentanyl in an upcoming execution, the Aug. 31 story reported.

According to author Andrew Russell, “Scott Dozier, 46, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on Nov. 14 for the 2002 murder of 22-year old Jeremiah Miller who was killed and dismembered. Dozier was already serving a 22-year sentence for the murder of Jasen Green, 27, whose body was also dismembered.

After years of using midazolam and hydromorphone as sedatives, pharmaceutical manufacturer Pfizer halted sale of its products to the Department of Corrections in 2016 in order to stop them from being used in executions, Russell reported.

After conferring with its chief medical officer, the correctional department’s director selected the combination of diazepam, fentanyl and cisatracurium, Russell reported.

Lethal injections typically involved a three-drug cocktail including a sedative to render the person unconscious, a muscle relaxant to paralyze them, followed by a fatal injection, according to Russell.

“This type of execution “is way out of step with our core values in this state”

“Fentanyl, an opioid that can be 100 times stronger than morphine, will be used in addition to diazepam, a sedative commonly known as Valium, and cisatracurium, which causes paralysis,” he explained.

This type of execution “is way out of step with our core values in this state,” said Tod Story, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada. “Nevadans deserve answers on exactly how the state plans to kill a prisoner in its custody.”

Each drug carries its own set of inherent risks when used in a multi-drug execution procedure. Those risks are magnified when we don’t know the source of the drug, the potency and purity of the drug, and circumstances in which it was manufactured, transported and stored,” said Robert Durham of the Death Penalty Information Center.

Durham further states, “These drugs share the problem with all the other drugs states have proposed to use in executions. None was designed to kill people.”

Experts and civil rights groups question the combination of these drugs because they have never been used before.

There is no recorded documentation of its effectiveness or the legality of its use, especially since the manufacturers of these drugs halted the sale of the product to the department, said Russell.

States seeking lethal injection cocktails from black market

https://sanquentinnews.com/pope-calls-teachings-capital-punishment-inadmissible/