what does it mean when correctional systems say that medications for capital punishment are not available? They are available, aren’t they?
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Several major pharmaceutical companies have blocked their products from being used in executions. So the drugs are, UNAVAILABLE. This has lead at least one state to reinstate execution by firing squad.
No pharmaceutical company wants to be known as the supplier for lethal injection drugs. So, they simply don’t sell those drugs to the government, and since the government can’t force the companies to supply them, the drugs are not available.
To perform a lethal injection, specific medication is needed and they are only produced by various pharmaceutical companies. The prisons need to buy the drugs.
Since drugs companies make medicines with the intention to treat disease and improve health, none of those companies want to connect themselves with a practice that is controversial (even within one country people agree and disagree with capital punishment, and then you look to an international community too), and causes death. Therefore they will not sell the products to the correctional systems so they can’t be connected.
That way they have no chance of being boycotted by anyone and risk loosing business.
The drugs needed are quite specific so it’s not just a case of taking them from the prison’s hospital as they aren’t available there. And buying them illegally isn’t an option as everything needs to be above board and legal.
You also won’t get a hospital providing them as a middle man between the drug companies and correctional system due to the phenomenally large difference in ethics and ethos.
All results in no medications available for executions.
On top of that you need to find someone willing to insert the drips and things so that the drugs could be administered. Most people who are trained to do this are in a medical field and this would go against their professional codes of practice, making it a dodgy area for their career (if not an outright stoppage of their career). And many of those on death row are former IV drug users, so aren’t easy to cannulate. Therefore it’s not as simple as training someone specifically to only cannulate these prisoners as it takes practice to be able to do it and maintain the skills (if someone is in hospital and has all their veins used, you need the most experienced nurse/doc/whatever to be the one to cannulate them, and they often have a more than a decade of experience to be the go to person)
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