From an Associated Press news story on January 26, 2011: "COLUMBUS, Ohio - The sole U.S. manufacturer of a sedative that Ohio plans to use to execute death row inmates and that Oklahoma already uses to do so said Wednesday it opposes the practice and has asked both states to stop using the drug.
Pentobarbital maker Lundbeck Inc. says it never intended for the drug to be used to put inmates to death.
"This goes against everything we're in business to do," Sally Benjamin Young, spokeswoman for the Denmark-based company's U.S. headquarters in Deerfield, Ill., told The Associated Press.
"We like to develop and make available therapies that improve people's lives," she said. "That's the focus of our business.""
"The first use of pentobarbital is planned for March's scheduled execution of Johnnie Baston of Lucas County, condemned to die for shooting the owner of a Toledo store in the back of the head during a 1994 robbery.
The drug has been used in 200 of the 525 assisted suicides in Oregon since 1998, according to data compiled by the Oregon Public Health Division. It also was prescribed for 5 of 47 assisted-suicide patients in Washington state in 2009, state health statistics show."
