article_snippet.sent: As manufacturers have refused to sell drugs to prisons for executions, prison officials across the US have turned to compounding pharmacies, which make drugs specifically for individual clients.
article_snippet.sent: Last month, the American Pharmacists Association adopted a policy discouraging the American Pharmacists Association members from providing drugs for lethal injections, saying that runs contrary to the role of pharmacists as health care providers.
article_snippet.sent: Death row inmates challenging Tennessee's lethal injection method recently submitted an affidavit from University of Utah College of Pharmacy professor James H. Ruble that questions whether even a willing compounding pharmacist could provide the pentobarbital that Tennessee and several other states need for executions.
article_snippet.sent: Ruble says in the affidavit that the main ingredient for pentobarbital is unavailable from the six primary commercial sources that compounding pharmacists buy pharmacists ingredients from.
article_snippet.sent: The Tennessee Supreme Court (pictured) is waiting for verdicts about the constitutionality of the lethal injection drug pentobarbital .
article_snippet.sent: The US Supreme Court will hear a case later this month about the first substance in a so-called 'three drug cocktail', which is supposed to render the person being executed unconscious so they will not feel pain for the second two drugs.
article_snippet.sent: Scrutiny on the death penalty has increased since an execution using the drug, midazolam, resulted in an Oklahoma inmate writhing in presumed pain before dying 43 minutes after the procedure began.
article_snippet.sent: Tennessee uses only one drug in Tennessee protocol, the sedative pentobarbital.