Pfizer
The logo of Dow Jones Industrial Average stock market index listed company Pfizer is pictured here in La Jolla, California April 21, 2016. Reuters/Mike Blake

The US Supreme Court issued in June 2015 a landmark decision declaring death by lethal injection legal. However, decision may have been weakened by the announcement on Friday by pharmaceutical giant Pfizer of its ban on the use of its drugs for capital punishment.

In prohibiting federally approved drugmakers from using Pfizer's drugs for executing death row convicts in the US, the company says its products are manufactured to enhance and save lives, not take it away, reports Associated Press.

In 2015, Pfizer purchased for $15.23 billion (AUD$20.9 billion) Hospira, which previously prohibited the use of its drugs for capital punishment. Besides Hospira, based in Lake Forest, Illinois, other drugmakers placed similar bans which resulted in difficulty for many states to execute its death row convicts using lethal injection.

Pfizer’s action was hailed by Reprieve, a human rights group based in New York, for cementing the industry’s opposition to the misuse of medicines. With the Pfizer policy, 25 Food and Drug Administration companies globally that make the drugs used as lethal injection cocktail have blocked the use of the drugs, says Reprieve.

To ensure compliance with the ban, Pfizer placed a surveillance and monitoring system and improved controls on distributors and wholesalers. But despite these measures, Arkansas uses potassium chloride – which stops the heart – manufactured by Hospira.

Death Penalty Information Center, which also opposes capital punishment, calls Pfizer’s move a symbolic and practical act against lethal injection. Robert Dunham, executive director of the center, points out that despite the objection by pharmaceutical firms for years, state correctional facilities could still buy the drugs from distributors.

Nevertheless, US executions were down to 28 people in 2015, the lowest number since 1991, reports The Wall Street Journal. To go around the ban on use of thiopental ad pentobarbital, some states resorted to using less tested drugs such as midazolam, a sedative, with uneven results.

Since 2016, six states have executed death row convicts, while another eight are slated in the coming months, two of them in June.