Several new details about Tennessee’s recent executions came to light this week, including the price of the drugs and issues with executions leading up to Christa Pike’s catastrophic failed one.
The state has paid more than a million dollars for lethal injection drugs since 2023, The Tennessean reports. Secrecy laws shield nearly every detail except for the dollar figure. So it’s unclear how many doses were purchased or where corrections officials bought the drugs.
It’s also unclear where the drugs were created. There are two options. The first, by a pharmaceutical company in a commercial facility, which requires the medications to be diverted out of the tightly regulated monitoring system for controlled substances. Or, it could have been mixed at a compounding pharmacy. Those are labs that undergo more lenient inspections than other pharmacies and make copies of commercial drugs, which are not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration…