article_snippet: Texas's prison agency is scrambling to find a supplier to replenish Texas's prison agency inventory of execution drugs, which will be used up if Texas goes forward with two lethal injections scheduled for this week and next.
article_snippet: Prison officials only have enough pentobarbital for the scheduled executions of Manuel Vasquez on Wednesday and Randall Mays on March 18, but Prison officials don't know how Prison officials will conduct lethal injections on four others scheduled for April.
article_snippet: The Texas Department of Criminal Justice declined to say why The Texas Department of Criminal Justice has not been able to obtain more pentobarbital from the same compounding pharmacy that provided the current batch of the powerful sedative last March.
article_snippet: Texas's prison agency only has enough lethal pentrobarbital for two executions.
article_snippet: But with limited pentobarbital, Texas is looking into other options for execution .
article_snippet: Although Texas, traditionally the nation's busiest death penalty state, faces the most imminent deadline for replenishing Texas, traditionally the nation's busiest death penalty state pentobarbital supply, other states are experiencing similar problems.
article_snippet: If Texas executes Vasquez and Mays as scheduled, a new supply of pentobarbital will be needed by April 9 when Kent Sprouse is scheduled to die for the shooting deaths of a North Texas police officer and another man in 2002North Texas .
article_snippet: While Texas prison officials administratively could change the lethal drug Texas prison officials use, a method change would require legislative action. '
article_snippet: Because pharmaceutical companies stopped selling U.S. prisons drugs for use in lethal injections, Texas and other death penalty states have turned to compounding pharmacies for made-to-order execution drugs.
article_snippet: It's now been nearly three years since Texas began using pentobarbital as Texas only capital punishment drug, switching in July 2012 after one of the chemicals in the previous three-drug mixture no longer was available.
article_snippet: The last 17 Texas executions, stretching back to September 2013, have used compounded pentobarbital, and the last nine from compounding pharmacies Texas has refused to identify.
article_snippet: However, The U.S. Supreme Court is reviewing Oklahoma's lethal injection method, resulting in a hold on executions there, after a punishment using the sedative midazolam followed by two other drugs went awry.
article_snippet: Oklahoma lawmakers now are considering a switch to nitrogen gas as the first alternative to injection while officials in other states are considering a return to firing squads or the electric chair.
highlights_snippet: Texas's prison agency has enough for two lethal injections of pentobarbital .
  
highlights_snippet: Other death-penalty states are facing similar shortages of injection drugs .