London firm supplied drugs for US executions

A pharmaceutical company operating out of a west London driving school has been supplying thousands of pounds worth of drugs used in executing death row inmates in Arizona, according to US court documents.

Dream Pharma, run by Mehdi Alavi and based in offices signed as the Elgone Driving Academy in Acton, exported three drugs used in lethal injections.

The identification of the British wholesaler today prompted the Department of Business, Innovations and Skills (BIS) to announce that it would review export controls on two of the drugs.

The third drug, sodium thiopental, was made the subject of export controls in November after the revelation that a British company had been selling the powerful anaesthetic to a US prison at a time when US manufacturers had run out of supplies.

The latest court documents, obtained by the anti-death penalty charity Reprieve, show Dream Pharma was paid £4,528.25 in September by Arizona State prison complex for 150 vials of sodium thiopental, 180 vials of potassium chloride and 450 vials of pancuronium bromide.

Sales of the chemicals at the time were not illegal. Reprieve said the "company sold the drugs to Arizona that were used in the execution of Jeffrey Landrigan [a death row inmate] on 26 October 2010, and that will send many other prisoners to their deaths".

Alavi, the managing director of Dream Pharma, was at the Elgone office today. He confirmed his identity but said: "I have no comment. I am not an articulate man. I don't want to put my foot in it."

According to a statement from a Reprieve official, Alavi had earlier suggested the drugs might have been intended for use in the Arizona prison hospital.

Clive Stafford Smith, the director of Reprieve, said: "The manner in which dangerous pharmaceuticals have been shuffled around without any controls points to a far deeper problem.

"Dream Pharma asserts that selling these drugs was no different from selling a hammer in a hardware shop. The analogy is apposite only if we include one fact – the customer told the salesman he planned to bludgeon someone to death with it outside the store.

"Vince Cable [the business secretary] has been sitting on his hands on this issue. If he is really against the death penalty, his office needs to read urgent requests for help in less than the two weeks it took here, and then act with urgency."

Reprieve said Arkansas state authorities had recently bought drugs for execution from the UK and that, within the last few days, "an additional 1,042 vials of sodium thiopental (sufficient to execute 85 prisoners) were released to California by the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA), after importation from the UK".

A spokeswoman for BIS said: "Vince Cable has already made clear his personal and the government's moral opposition to the death penalty.

"We are reviewing whether the other two drugs [potassium chloride and pancuronium bromide] should be subject to export controls. They are both used in hospitals around the world every day. There's no evidence to suggest that there's a shortage of them in the states."

Emails obtained from the US courts, however, show the Arizona authorities had obtained pancuronium bromide from the UK because they "could not acquire enough in the US" and potassium chloride because they "could get [it] in the US, but not necessarily in time".

The UK's Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency confirmed that Dream Pharma was a licensed pharmaceutical wholesaler. The sodium thiopental sold by the company has been passed along a long supply chain.

It is manufactured in Austria and sold to a Reading-based pharmaceutical company, Archimedes Pharma. Archimedes said it sells sodium thiopental to distributors but that it had no direct dealing with, or knowledge of, Dream Pharma.

"Archimedes Pharma holds a marketing authorisation for sodium thiopental and supplies the product in the UK, in full accordance with all relevant regulations, through the recognised UK pharmaceutical supply chain, where our distributor supplies primarily to hospital pharmacies within the NHS but also to wholesalers," it said.

"Archimedes does not export the product to the US. Consistent with applicable regulations, Archimedes does not have information on specific end purchasers or users of its products."

Sodium thiopental is widely used as an anaesthetic. In the US, however, it is frequently used as a means of administering the death penalty.

Inmates are initially injected with the chemical, which can induce unconsciousness in a few seconds.

Then pancuronium bromide is administered, causing paralysis of respiratory muscles, before potassium chloride is given, which stops the inmate's heart, causing death by cardiac arrest.

• Capital punishment
• Arizona
• Pharmaceuticals industry
• news

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