Missouri's love of capital punishment endangers all Americans
If you follow either surgery news or Michael Jackson news, you know about propofol. It is a "sedative and amnesiac" agent produced nearly exclusively by the German pharmaceutical firm Fresenius Kabi. It's hard to make, so almost all of it - about 85 percent of America's propofol supply - comes from one plant in Europe. It has four big advantages over other anesthetics: it works extremely quickly, allows the patient to wake up from the procedure quicker than other drugs, has few side effects and lets anesthetists do their work less expensively than with other drugs. Put 'em together and you've got a drug that gets used in four out of five operations performed today.
Propofol is also famous, thanks to Mr. Jackson's favorite quack, for its ability to kill you. It has what doctors call a "very narrow therapeutic index" - the dose that kills is only slightly more than the dose that works. When the Missouri State Prison's infirmary was accidentally shipped a case of 20 vials of propofol last year, the warden knew just what to do with it...he got the state to alter its execution protocol to use this drug rather than one of the other European-made anesthetics you can't get anymore. And now, they intend to inject Allen Nicklasson with ten vials of propofol on October 23, followed by Joseph Franklin on November 10.
The problem is very simple, regardless of your opinion of capital punishment. The European Union forbids the export of any item to a country that might reasonably use it in an execution. The manufacturer has reduced the number of its US distributors to the bare minimum and requires them to never sell the product to a prison. (I have no idea what they do if a prisoner needs surgery...probably take the inmate to a civilian hospital.) Should Missouri go through with its plan, any shipment of propofol will have to be separately licensed and it will have to go to only one hospital...and, considering that the EU Office of Export Control is going to be pissed about having to do this, that's going to take a while. Anesthetics are a low-profit business, so there's no motivation to set up a propofol line in a US pharm plant...and it's hard enough to make this that the Chinese won't start.
I don't think there's anything we can do to stop this...everyone from the major Missouri newspapers to the Missouri anesthesiologists' association has pleaded with Gov. Nixon to return the propofol, and the prison still has it.
http://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/columns/the-platform/editorial-missouri-gets-death-drug-by-mistake-capital-punishment-for/article_5dbc26f1-cef6-5882-8539-db17ae5862eb.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57440903/propofol-drug-that-michael-jackson-odd-on-to-be-used-in-missouri-executions/
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Right now, Missouri has two allowable forms of capital punishment on its books: lethal injection and the gas chamber. Nixon is claiming that if they don't let him use propofol (right now I'm getting about sick of autocorrect, because the shit keeps changing that word to "proposal"
he's going to put out bids for a new gas chamber because the gaskets on the old one are so bad they can't use it. Come now Jay...you're the fucking GOVERNOR, and you've got a whole statehouse full of Republicans who love executions more than they love tax cuts. You mean you can't get your legislature to write you a law allowing hanging or the firing squad to be used in executions?
