The Texas death chamber in May 19, 2000.
Pat Sullivan / ASSOCIATED PRESS
Two states — Arizona and Texas — attempted to illegally import sodium thiopental this July for use in executions, but the Food and Drug Administration stopped the shipments in the U.S. before they could leave the airports.
Records obtained by BuzzFeed News show shipments of sodium thiopental made their way to airports in Phoenix and Houston in late July, with their intended recipients being the Arizona Department of Corrections and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, respectively.
Neither department responded on Thursday evening to BuzzFeed News's requests for comment.
The Arizona Republic first reported the news of Arizona's attempt on Thursday, using records they obtained from an open records lawsuit. Although redacted, the documents they obtained mirror unredacted documents of a sale between Nebraska and Harris Pharma, a sale on which BuzzFeed News has reported extensively.
FDA records of imports of sodium thiopental show two shipments of sodium thiopental were submitted on July 27.
An employee with the company handling the shipping, Alpha Brokers Corp., confirmed to BuzzFeed News that the shipments were for the Arizona Department of Corrections and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. The company was identified in FDA records as having transported the shipments. The employee who spoke with BuzzFeed News added that the shipments are still being detained by the FDA.
Nebraska has been open about its attempts to import the drug, but the two other states use secrecy laws to hide where they get their drugs.
BuzzFeed News spent months investigating Harris Pharma and its owner, Chris Harris — a man without a pharmaceutical background. Although he calls his company a manufacturer and distributor, the facility he recently registered with the FDA is actually a small rented office space. The facility that he lists on Drug Enforcement Administration forms is actually an old apartment building that he has not lived in for years.
Harris attempted to ship Nebraska 1,000 vials of the drug in August, but it never left India due to the drugs not being FDA-approved. The Arizona Republic reported that the Arizona Corrections Department contracted to purchase 1,000 vials of the drug as well.
“It’s a drug deal gone bad," Dale Baich, the assistant federal public defender who is one of the attorneys representing Arizona death row inmates in a lawsuit challenging the state's lethal injection procedures, told BuzzFeed News. "The question that remains is did Arizona get ripped off?"
The FDA has consistently maintained that importing sodium thiopental would be illegal. Nebraska and, it is now known, Arizona and Texas have attempted to move forward regardless.
Sodium thiopental is an anesthetic that is no longer used in the U.S., although it remains in use in the developing world. Its sole FDA-approved manufacturer stopped making the drug to keep it out of the hands of death penalty states.
LINK: This Is The Man In India Who Is Selling States Illegally Imported Execution Drugs
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