Georgia’s supply of a drug used for lethal injections was seized Wednesday by the Drug Enforcement Administration, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.
The move comes a few weeks after a lawyer for a death row inmate in the state sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice claiming that the Georgia Department of Corrections violated the federal Controlled Substance Act when it obtained the sedative thiopental directly from a company in the UK.
The letter said Corrections is not registered with the federal government to import drugs and the agency did not “submit a declaration to the Drug Enforcement Administration when GDC imported thiopental last year.
“DEA did take control of the controlled substances today,” DEA spokesman Chuvalo Truesdell told the Journal-Constitution about the seizure. “There were questions about the way the drugs were imported over here.”
Georgia is one of the states that uses thiopental as one part of a three-drug cocktail for lethal injections. But the only U.S. company that produced the drug, Hospira Inc., decided earlier this year that it would stop making the drug, leaving several states with a shortage. Texas, for instance, on Wednesday announced that it will switch to using pentobarbital, a drug often used to euthanize animals.
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