Lethal and illegal: black-market death deals.

• Author: Balko, Radley
• Position: Citings - Brief article

THE EUROPEAN Union, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and American prison officials are locked in an unusual battle over sodium thiopental, a drug used for lethal injections in most state executions.

The dispute began in 2008, when the EU called for worldwide abolition of the death penalty. Since that declaration, the U.K., Germany, and other countries have erected regulatory barriers to prevent pharmaceutical companies from exporting sodium thiopental to the United States. Hospira, the only remaining U.S. manufacturer of the drug, announced in January that it would stop making it after Italy nixed the company's plans to open a manufacturing plant there.

As a result, states have been running out of sodium thiopental. But since there are still executions to be carried out, many states began doing what everyone else does when government policy makes it difficult to legally obtain the drugs they want: They started buying the stuff on...