How Little Pharma made a killing in Arizona

When their normal suppliers ran out of sodium thiopental, one of the three drugs needed to perform an execution by lethal injection, the authorities at Arizona State Prison found the perfect alternative: an independent drugs wholesaler operating out of the back room of a driving school in Acton, west London.

Dream Pharma Ltd, majority-owned by 50-year-old Mehdi Alavi, duly packed up 150 vials of sodium thiopental (it's administered to the doomed man first, as an anaesthetic), 180 vials of potassium chloride (injected next, to cause muscle paralysis) and 450 vials of pancuronium bromide (given last, to bring on cardiac arrest).

Dream Pharma (company slogan: 'Dedicated to the healthcare of the public') then FedExed the package to Florence, Arizona, and invoiced the jail authorities for £4,528.25.

The fact that the death sentence was abolished in Britain 45 years ago appeared to have no bearing on this nice little earner for the Acton company.

This extraordinary insight into a little-reported aspect of the drugs industry comes courtesy of the BBC Radio's Today programme, which obtained the Dream Pharma invoice as the result of a freedom of information request in the United States.

The invoice was dated September 28 - which meant the drugs arrived in good time for the execution of Jeffrey Landrigan, a convicted murderer, in the prison's 'death house' on October 26.

Mehdi Alavi told the BBC he had "no idea" why the Arizona prison would order the drugs from him - a statement pooh-poohed by the London-based prisoners' rights charity Reprieve. "Dream Pharma's tentative assertion to the media that they did not know the drugs were to be used for executions is simply false," said Reprieve's Clive Stafford Smith.

"The three drugs they sold to the Arizona State Prison are the three drugs used for lethal injection, and the emails back and forth make it clear that they knew precisely what they were doing.

"Indeed, Mr Alavi made it clear to Reprieve that he favoured capital punishment. Sadly, the profit was blood money, pure and simple."

As The First Post reported the morning after Landrigan's execution in October, his case made headlines after his lawyers sought a stay of execution on the grounds that the sodium thiopental the prison proposed to use on their client had not been supplied by the normal US source and was not therefore approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Landrigan's lawyers argued successfully that their client might die in pain if the anaesthetic was not of sufficient quality.

But the case was referred to the Supreme Court who said there was no evidence that the sodium thiopental was unsafe or had been unlawfully obtained and gave the go-ahead to Landrigan's execution.

"This drug came from a reputable place," said Arizona's chief deputy attorney general Tim Nelson, after the execution. "There's all sorts of wild speculation that it came from a Third World country and that's not accurate."

What Nelson didn't say was that it had been procured from the back room of the Elgone Driving Academy in Horn Lane, Acton, by way of a Reading-based company, Archimedes Pharma, who had purchased it from the manufacturers in Austria.

Reprieve would like to see pharmaceutical companies voluntarily establish a Hippocratic code asserting that their drugs should be used "only for the benefit of patients, not for executions".

However, the chances of that appear to be about as slim as the people of Arizona volunteering to give up the death penalty.

Hospira, the Illinois-based pharmaceuticals company which normally provides US death chambers with sodium thiopental, but ran out of the 'active ingredient' needed to produce it, is on record as disapproving of its product being used as a component in lethal injections.

Yet Hospira (slogan: 'Advancing Wellness') apparently has no intention of stopping supplying US death chambers with sodium thiopental once supplies of the active ingredient are back on stream.

"We are working to get it back onto the market for our customers as soon as possible," company spokesman Dan Rosenberg said in September.

While down in Acton, Mehdi Alavi tells reporters: "I'm not as articulate as many people. I refrain to make any comments."

According to Reprieve, Alavi said at one point - before he stopped making any comments - that he thought perhaps the drugs were destined for the prison hospital.

Given that the only other common use of sodium thiopental is as an anaesthetic for women about to undergo Caesarean sections, this was a dubious claim. ·