Hawking Poison: Desperate US prisons look for lethal drugs from India. Should we market death?

Anjali Puri

Sodium Thiopental:   

• What Short-acting barbiturate used as an anaesthetic. First of a standard three-drug protocol used in the United States to execute prisoners sentenced to death. Lethal dose (up to 5 grams) used to render prisoner unconscious, after which a paralytic and a toxic agent injected in sequence.  
• Why Shortage of sodium thiopental in the US after sole domestic supplier, shut production in 2009, citing lack of raw materials. Demand low, outside of prisons in the US. 
• How Initially, US prisons able to import it from Britain, but ban imposed by Britain, other European countries, after human rights groups protest. Mainstream drug companies reluctant to supply. Therefore, some prisons are turning to India.

***

It all started with a mundane phonecall in August, received by the Noida office of a Swiss-Indian drug company called Naari. The caller, a Calcutta-based Indian businessman called Chris Harris, wanted samples of a drug called sodium thiopental to dispatch, he explained, to Zambia for registration by the country’s drug authorities. It was a perfectly plausible request. The drug, though largely replaced by better anaesthetics in the West, is still used widely in the developing world. Accordingly, Naari dipped into its stocks and sent vials containing 485 grams of sodium thiopental to Harris in Calcutta in end-September; and waited for the large order that he said would follow.
A few weeks later, the firm’s Indian officials were stunned when an investigator with the London-based charity, Reprieve, which campaigns against the death penalty, called to tell them where those samples had really gone. Not to Zambia, but the American state of Nebraska; not for medicinal use, but to execute convicts by the chosen American method, lethal injection (see infographic).
Surprise turned to outrage when they learnt from the investigator, Maya Foa, that Naari had even been named as the supplier of the drug in a press release issued by Nebraska’s Department of Correctional Services (NCDs) on November 3. “We’re not in the business of helping to execute people, we were lied to and cheated,” says a spokesman for the company. The prison paid $5,411 for the chemicals—over 15 times what Naari would have ordinarily charged Harris for them. But Harris hadn’t paid at all. By selling Naari’s free samples to Nebraska’s execution machinery, apparently desperate for drugs, the small-time middleman had made—yes—a killing.
Foa, who’s working with Naari on strategies to prevent the exported drugs being used in executions, says the episode, though shocking, is typical. “It is often the case that manufacturers and suppliers are drawn into this trade unwittingly and have no idea their drugs are going to execution chambers,” she says. That knowledge belongs to perfidious middlemen, key players in a macabre niche of global commerce ominously seeking to widen its footprint in India.
High US standards for foreign drugs drop dramatically when it involves import of drugs for lethal injections.
Harris, for instance, has been in assiduous contact with American prison departments, as shown by documents obtained by campaigners through Freedom of Information Act applications. It was he who brokered transactions in which Nebraska and South Dakota bought sodium thiopental in December 2010 and February 2011 respectively from Kayem Pharmaceuticals Pvt Ltd, which turned out to be a two-room outfit in a Mumbai suburb. (Eventually, US enforcement officials did not permit the use of those drugs, due to procedural violations in the import process.) Dipak Shangvi of Ganpati Exim, a Calcutta wholesaler and exporter of drugs, says he was in discussions with Harris a few months ago over supplying the drug to the US, but pulled out quickly when he realised—thanks to a Google search that led him to ask Harris some probing questions—that it was going to a prison. “We are Jains,” he said, by way of explanation.
The intriguing larger question is: why are state institutions in the mighty United States shopping at the murky end of the pharma trade? The answer is, they don’t have much choice. Drug companies, increasingly reluctant to be branded as suppliers of drugs for lethal injections, are distancing themselves from US prisons, which is no small achievement for hyperactive anti-capital punishment groups. When Hospira, the sole producer of sodium thiopental within the US, shut shop in 2009, for a variety of reasons, some US prisons initially managed to source the drug from Britain. (By now, it will not surprise readers to know it came from a company that operated out of the back of a driving school.) However, campaigners put an end to that trade by persuading several European governments to ban it. Many US prisons switched to a single drug called pentobarbital, commonly used to put down dogs, but campaigners won that round, too. In July this year, a Danish company, Lundbeck, the only licensed maker of the drug in the US, bowed to pressure (especially when it took the form of a major investor, a Danish pension fund, selling off a hefty € 5.4 million worth of its shares) and agreed to deny the drug to American execution chambers.
What has made the campaign against lethal injection popular is not just European aversion to the death penalty, but the campaigners’ unrelenting focus on American double standards. The US Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) zealously protects its citizens from the perceived shortcomings of foreign drugs (ask big Indian pharmaceutical firms, which have to jump through many hoops for usfda approval, before their products can enter the US market) but those standards drop dramatically, clearly for political reasons, when it comes to the import of drugs for lethal injections. That’s why consignments arranged by Indian middlemen are able to make it to US prisons.
The tacit rationale seems to be that standards don’t matter for people who will die anyway. But lawyers and campaigners are contesting that cynical argument, both in and outside the courts. They argue that murky supply chains can result in chemicals becoming degraded and lead to torturous and painful deaths. The chilling, oft-cited recent case is of Brandon Rhode, 31, whose eyes remained open until he died, leading a doctor to testify that the imported (from Britain) sodium thiopental injected into him may have “lacked efficiency”.
While campaigners are all set to fight the use of the latest imports for executions, the Indian route is a worry, admits Foa. “We have been very successful; some US states are now in a de facto state of moratorium on the death penalty. This could take us backwards.”
Should Indians care? Opinions are divided, even among those who usually care, reflecting cleavages on the larger question of capital punishment. (There is also a certain exasperation with the blinkered, single-issue vision of western groups.) C.M. Gulhati, usually a trenchant critic of drug companies, sees no case to answer here. “If we execute our prisoners, we really can’t object to Americans executing theirs. There are no legal, clinical or ethical grounds on which we can say, don’t export the drug to American prisons,” he says. Amar Jesani, an expert on ethics, rights and health systems, disagrees: “What is lawful is not necessarily ethical. Section 377 was not ethical, the death penalty is not.” Pointing out that doctors in America do not, by consensus, administer lethal injections, he says: “If they don’t participate in killing, pharmaceutical companies shouldn’t either. They should be named and shamed when they do.”
Interestingly, Dilip G. Shah, secretary general of the Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance, takes much the same tack. Dismissively, he says, “This is a niche segment, dominated by unscrupulous small operators looking for easy money. None of the large pharmaceutical companies would touch it. They wouldn’t want to be associated with killing people.” And why, he asks, should the industry compromise on its reputation for relatively small gains: “The volume is nothing—are there that many people on death row?” For campaigners, that last argument might work best, in persuading India to turn its back on this sordid trade. Self-interest usually gets more done than ethics.

Courtesy: Outlook (5th December, 2011)

~:Selected pieces from the Booker Prize (2006) winning Novel: The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai:~

This lady seems to  have a fascination to use slangs and highly sensual texts at random, especially the four letter word. Let us have a look at some of the sentences from the "Award Winning" book:

• He covered his timidity with manufactured disgust: "How can you? Those, those women are dirty," he said primly. "Stinking bitches," sounding awkward. "Fucking bitches, fucking cheap women you’ll get some disease . . . smell bad . . . hubshi. . . all black and ugly . . . they make me sick. . [Chapter: 3].
• Chile—in the Zona Rosa duty-free of Tierra del Fuego, Indians, whiskey, electronics. Bitterness at the thought of Pakistanis up in the Areca used-car business. "Ah . . . forget it. . . let those bhenchoots make their quarter percent. [Chapter: 5]. 
• In his cabin bunk at night, the sea made indecent licking sounds about the ship’s edge. He thought of how he had half undressed and hurriedly re-dressed his wife, of how he had only glimpsed her expression, just bits and pieces of it in the slipping of the pallu over her head. However in memory of the closeness of female flesh, his penis reached up in the dark and waved about, a simple blind sea creature but refusing to be refused. He found his own organ odd: insistent but cowardly; pleading but pompous. [Chapter: 8].
• Their washing line sagged under a load of Marks and Spencer panties, and through large leg portholes, they were favored with views of Kanchenjunga collared by cloud. At the entrance to the house hung a thangkha of a demon—with hungry fangs and skull necklaces, brandishing an angry penis—to dissuade the missionaries. In the drawing room was a trove of knickknacks. [Chapter: 9]. 
• She sometimes thought herself pretty, but as she began to make a proper investigation, she found it was a changeable thing, beauty. No sooner did she locate it than it slipped from her grasp; instead of disciplining it, she was unable to refrain from exploiting its flexibility. She stuck her tongue out at herself and rolled her eyes, then smiled beguilingly. She transformed her expression from demon to queen. When she brushed her teeth, she noticed her breasts jiggle like two jellies being rushed to the table. She lowered her mouth to taste the flesh and found it both firm and yielding. This plumpness jiggliness firmness softness, all coupled together in an unlikely manner, must surely give her a certain amount of bartering power? [Chapter: 13]. 
• Now he walked through the greasy bus station with its choking smell of exhaust and past the dark cubbyhole where, behind a soiled red curtain, you could pay to watch on a shaking screen such films as Rape of Erotic Virgin and SHE: The Secrets of Married Life.[Chapter: 15]. 
• "Fucking Russians! Crazy borscht and shit!" shouted Mr. Bocher in anger, but to no avail, and abruptly, it was all over again. "Fuck you, you fuckers," he yelled at the men who had worked for him.[Chapter: 17].
• The reasoning, they all knew from having heard this before, formed a central pillar of Hindu belief and it went like this: so strict was the Koran that its teachings were beyond human capability. Therefore Muslims were forced to pretend one thing, do another; they drank, smoked, ate pork, visited prostitutes, and then denied it. Unlike Hindus, who needn’t deny. [Chapter: 21]
• Jemubhai was glad he could disguise his inexpertness, his crudity, with hatred and fury—this was a trick that would serve him well throughout his life in a variety of areas—but, my God, the grotesqueness of it all shocked him: the meeting of reaching, suckering organs in an awful attack and consumption; maimed, bruise-colored kicking, cringing forms of life; sour, hair-fringed gullet; agitating snake muscled malevo-lency; the stench of urine and shit mixed up with the smell of sex; the squelch, the marine squirt, that uncontrollable run—it turned his civilized stomach.[Chapter: 28] 
• The container broke apart, the powder lurched up filtered down. Ghoulishly sugared in sweet candy pigment, he clamped down on her, tussled her to the floor, and as more of that perfect rose complexion, blasted into a million motes, came filtering down, in a dense frustration of lust and fury—penis uncoiling, mottled purple-black as if with rage, blundering, uncovering the chute he had heard rumor of—he stuffed his way ungracefully into her. [Chapter: 28]
• She didn’t know much about the English, and whatever she did know was based on a few snatches of talk that had reached them in the seclusion of the women’s quarters, such as the fact that Englishwomen at the club played tennis dressed only in their underwear.
  "Shorts!" said a young uncle.
  "Underwear," the ladies insisted.
  Among underwear-clad ladies wielding tennis rackets, how would she manage?
  She picked up the judge’s powder puff, unbuttoned her blouse, and powdered her breasts. She hooked up her blouse again and that puff, so foreign, so silken, she stuffed inside; she was too grown-up for childish thieving, she knew, but she was filled with greed. [Chapter: 29] 
• As he left he could hear Sai beginning to sob. "You dirty bastard," she shouted through her weeping, "you get back here. Behave so badly and then run away??" [Chapter: 29]
• "You bastard," she said to the emptiness. "My dignity is worth a thousand of you." [Chapter: 29]
• "Shut the fuck up, motherfucker," men shouted from up above. "Shithead. What the fuck. For fuck’s sake. Asshole. Fuck you." A rain of beer bottles crashed around them. [Chapter: 30]
• His papers, his papers. The green card, green card, the machoot sala oloo ka patha chaar sau bees green card that was not even green. It roosted heavily, clumsily, pinkishly on his brain day and night; he could think of nothing else, and he threw up sometimes, embracing the toilet, emptying his gullet into its gullet, lying over it like a drunk. The post brought more letters from his father, and as he picked them up, he cried. Then he read them and he grew violently angry. [Chapter: 30] 
• Before the butcher slit the goat’s throat, Biju could hear him working up his disdain, yelling "Bitch, whore, cunt, sali," at her, dragging her forward then, and killing her. [Chapter: 30]
• But Bose swung rapidly to another position—satisfaction either way—but depth, resolution. Still a question for Bose: should he damn the past or find some sense in it? Drunk, eyes aswim with tears, "Bastards!" he said with such bitterness. "What bastards they were!" raising his voice as if attempting to grant himself conviction. "Goras—get away with everything don’t they? Bloody white people. They’re responsible for all the crimes of the century!" [Chapter: 31] 
•  One of the boy’s attackers had unzipped his pants and was pissing on him, surrounded by a crowd of jeering red-faced men. [Chapter: 32].
• The call was over, and the emptiness Biju hoped to dispel was reinforced. He could not talk to his father; there was nothing left between them but emergency sentences, clipped telegram lines shouted out as if in the midst of a war. They were no longer relevant to each other’s lives except for the hope that they would be relevant. He stood with his head still in the phone booth studded with bits of stiff chewing gum and the usual Fuck-ShitCockDickPussyLoveWar, swastikas, and hearts shot with arrows mingling in a dense graffiti garden, too sugary too angry too perverse—the sick sweet rotting mulch of the human heart. [Chapter: 36].
• There was the joy of the chase and the joy of the fleeing, and when he set off on practical research trips, he had found pure love in the most sordid of spots, the wrong sides of town where the police didn’t venture; medieval, tunneling streets so narrow you had to pass crabwise past the drug dealers and the whores; where, at night, men he never saw ladled their tongues into his mouth. [Chapter: 39] 
• He looked up the word in the card catalog and brought back armfuls of books; he smoked cheroots, drank port and Madeira, read everything he could from psychology to science to pornography to poetry, Egyptian love letters, ninth century Tamilian erotica. [Chapter: 39]
• They looked pretty in the sun, these little homes, babies crawling about with bottoms red through pants with the behinds cut out so they could do their susu and potty; fuschia and roses—for everyone in Kalimpong loved flowers and even amid botanical profusion added to it. [Chapter: 40] 
• Chickens, chickens, chickens bought to supplement a tiny income. The birds had never revealed themselves to her so clearly; a grotesque bunch, rape and violence being enacted, hens being hammered and pecked as they screamed and flapped, attempting escape from the rapist rooster. [Chapter: 40]
• "Look at that. It’s getting fucking Biblical," said someone next to him at the rails. "Fucking Job. Why? Why?" [Chapter: 41]
• The gale took his words and whipped them away; they reached Biju’s ears strangely clipped, on their way to somewhere else. The man turned his face in toward Biju to save the wind from thus slicing their conversation. "Muhheakunnuk, Muh-heakunnuk—the river that flows both ways," he added with significant eyebrows, "both ways. That is the real fucking name." Sentences spilled out of the face along with juicy saliva. He was smiling and slavering over his information, gobbling and dispelling at the same time.But what was the false name then? Biju possessed no name at all for this black water. It was not his history. And then came fucking Moby Dick. The river full of dead fucking whales. The fucking carcasses were hauled up the river, fucking pulverised in the factories. "Oil, you know," he said with intense internal frustration. "It’s always been fucking oil. And underwear." Eyebrows and saliva spray. "Corsets!!" he said suddenly. [Chapter: 41].
• All over India the crops had been rotting in the fields, the nation’s prostitutes complaining about lack of business because every male in the country had his eyes glued to the screen.  [Chapter: 41].
• He received blank faces, some angry laughter. "Saala Machoot. . . what does he think? We’re going to look for his dog?" People were insulted. "At a time like this. We can’t even eat!" [Chapter: 46]
• "How am I supposed to travel to Jalpaiguri in my dirty underwear? As it is I am smelling so badly, I am ashamed even to go near anyone," the same lady said, holding her own nose with an anguished expression to show how she was ashamed even to be near herself. [Chapter: 48] 
• "Stupid bitch, dirty bitch!" The more he swore, the harder he found he could hit. [Chapter: 49]

 Strauss-Kahn's sex scandal to be turned into porn film
By ANI, Thursday, Nov 3, 2011

[See how Media distorts the News: The "alleged molestation" (which already is crumbling due to lack of evidence in the court of law) becomes "Alleged Rape"...and this time it is not the Indian Rotten Press, it is from the reputed house like ANI.... The basic character of world-wide media has deteriorated to nadir in the last two--three decades or so...in an efforts to grab the eye-balls, in the midst of fierce competition.!! Now if you say, you are a journalists, many people might try to shun you on the fear of getting involved in unnecessary troubles. Some of these unscrupulous media-men are responsible for this and have degraded this noble profession]

Paris, Nov 3 (ANI): The internationally publicized allegation of rape by a New York hotel maid against former International Monitory Fund head Dominique Strauss Kahn will now turned into a porn movie.
The film tilted "DXK", will be produced by the company My Porn Production that has urged public to help fund the film's 200,000 Euros production.
The film will star Roberto Malone as the lead character "David Sex King." Porn star Sandra Romain will play his wife and actress Katia De Lys will portray the hotel maid.
According to the producers, the film will be a "parody" of the scandal that saw Strauss-Kahn accused of sexually assaulting Nafissatou Diallo, a Guinean hotel maid, The Local reports.
The scandal dashed Strauss-Kahn's hopes of becoming the Socialist Party's challenger to President Nicolas Sarkozy in upcoming election.
The French politician is still facing a US civil suit brought against him by Diallo. (ANI)