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 signposted as Elgone Driving Academy in Acton, west London, exported three drugs given in lethal injections.
Identification of the British wholesaler yesterday prompted the Department of Business, Innovations and Skills (BIS) to announce it would review export controls on two of the drugs.
The third drug, sodium thiopental, was made the subject of export controls last 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”.
Mr Alavi, the managing director of Dream Pharma, was at the Elgone office yesterday. He confirmed his identity but declined to comment beyond saying: “I have no comment. I am not an articulate man. I don’t want to put my foot in it.”
Clive Stafford Smith, the director of Reprieve, said: “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.”
Sodium thiopental is widely used as an anaesthetic. In the US it is also used to administer 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. – (Guardianservice)