Texas, which historically leads the nation in executions, is approaching the grim milestone of 600 people executed by lethal injection since the early 1980s.
But for the past 10 years, a protective statute intended to protect the safety of those involved in the execution protocol has allowed the state to withhold a revealing piece of information: where Texas finds pentobarbital, the hard-to-find drug it uses exclusively to carry out executions.
The source of pentobarbital remains a closely guarded secret from the public, but records reviewed by NBC News piece together the state’s cryptic procurement process, including how much of the drug Texas has acquired over the past year and the hundreds of thousands of dollars that have been spent on transactions related to drug costs.
According to those records, in September 2024, Texas acquired 20 1-gram vials of pentobarbital, and in February obtained eight 2.5-gram vials — enough, according to its protocol, for up to eight executions.
The purchases, which are documented on DEA forms, obscure supplier information; The agency told NBC News it could not comment amid the ongoing federal government shutdown.
It’s still unclear exactly how much Texas paid for injectable pentobarbital. The state Department of Criminal Justice did not respond to requests for comment on the supply of execution drugs and the amount spent.
However, a document prepared by the department in response to a request for information on the costs of drug supplies in lethal injection executions shows multiple transaction amounts dated from October 2024 and February and March of this year totaling more than $775,000.
The document is partially redacted and does not reveal the exact breakdown of expenses.
But if Texas had spent more than three-quarters of a million dollars as part of its search for pentobarbital, it would be in line with several other states, whose officials have revealed in recent months that they have shelled out large sums — far exceeding the wholesale value of pentobarbital — for their execution drugs, anti-death penalty groups and legal experts say.
Under public pressure, some of those states have confirmed the purchase, at a high price, of manufactured drugs, meaning they were produced by a pharmaceutical company approved by the Food and Drug Administration and not a compounding pharmacy, which are poorly regulated and have raised concerns about quality, safety and effectiveness.
The pharmaceutical industry is widely opposed to its drugs being used for capital punishment, so it remains a mystery where the recent purchases of pentobarbital used for executions in Texas and other states come from. Opposition from the pharmaceutical industry has prompted lawsuits and cease-and-desist letters from drug makers and made it increasingly difficult for states to obtain needed chemicals.
“Enforcing states are doing everything they can to hide these purchases from taxpayers, defense attorneys and the pharmaceutical companies whose controls they are violating, and they keep getting caught,” said Matt Wells, deputy director of Reprieve US, a human rights nonprofit.
He added that the lack of transparency means that states do not have to publicly disclose the measures taken to ensure their drugs comply with the companies’ protocols and are safe for use in executions. Lethal injection has the highest rate of “botched” executions of all methods, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. While the U.S. Constitution does not guarantee a painless death during execution, it prohibits the infliction of additional pain that creates unnecessary suffering.
“When state after state spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on the black market to purchase drugs they can’t obtain legitimately, we’re talking about a system that is broken beyond repair,” Wells said.
cost of drugs
Other states with secrecy laws have been able to obtain the drug, but at a cost several times its normal market value.
In recent years, Idaho spent about $200,000 total on three separate purchases of manufactured pentobarbital, NBC News previously reported. A batch of six vials at $50,000 was more than three times the wholesale price.
In June, Indiana Gov. Mike Braun confirmed that his state had paid more than $1 million for four doses of pentobarbital, some of which expired before they could be used. It is not clear how much each dose amounts to.
Utah spent approximately $200,000 on pentobarbital manufactured and used in an execution in 2024, corrections officials said.
And since 2017, Tennessee has purchased nearly $600,000 worth of execution drugs from an undisclosed supplier, The Tennessean reported in March.
Commercially manufactured injectable pentobarbital can cost about $2,500 for a 2.5-gram vial, said Jeffrey Pilz, assistant director of pharmacy at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.
In the case of Texas, Pilz said, the eight 2.5-gram vials of pentobarbital he purchased in February should have cost about $20,000.
But when execution drugs are priced significantly high, particularly for federally approved manufactured drugs, questions arise about who sold them to a state, how that supplier obtained them and whether regulatory channels were subverted, said Maurie Levin, a death penalty attorney in Texas.
“Texas’ secrecy law allows the state to hide the unethical practices of some of the pharmacies from which they obtain drugs, and how they purchase execution drugs, including what appears to be the purchase of drugs on the black market, at enormous cost,” Levin said.
Manufactured Drugs Versus Compounded Drugs
Two pharmaceutical companies manufacturing in the United States are known to make injectable pentobarbital, a sedative most commonly used to treat insomnia and seizures.
Both Hikma, a U.K.-based company whose U.S. headquarters is in New Jersey, and Sagent, based in Illinois, have called on states to ensure their drugs are not used in executions.
Sagent warned Idaho in a letter last year that when its “products are diverted from legitimate channels, in violation of our distribution controls, they risk being counterfeit, stolen, contaminated, or otherwise harmful.”
It is unclear whether Hikma or Sagent have sent similar warnings to Texas. Neither company responded to requests for comment, although a spokesperson for Hikma told NBC News this year that it has sent such letters to states annually for the past eight years “to strongly remind them of our strong objections to the use of our drugs in capital punishment.”
Read more death row coverage
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice also did not respond to questions about whether the batch of pentobarbital it most recently purchased was manufactured or from a compounding pharmacy.
Texas began using only pentobarbital, a sedative, for executions in 2012. A potent dose can cause death from respiratory failure.
In 2015, Texas, along with Arizona and Nebraska, attempted to import thousands of vials of sodium thiopental, an anesthetic, from a supplier in India for use in executions, but the FDA seized the Texas shipments because they were not approved in the US.
After that, Texas reportedly moved to acquire pentobarbital from the state’s compounding pharmacies. Compounded medications have a shorter shelf life than manufactured ones and are typically labeled with an “expiration date,” similar to an expiration date, Pilz said.
Texas is known to relabel the expiration dates on its medications, a practice that has come under fire in recent years by death row inmates who have alleged in court that the medications are expired and unsafe.
‘Use it or lose it’
The documents indicate that Texas’ pentobarbital stockpile includes some lots labeled with expiration dates, meaning it was compounded, and others with expiration dates, suggesting it was manufactured.
A manufacturer sets the expiration date, which “is derived from sterility, stability, and analytical chemistry studies” performed in a controlled environment, according to a guide from the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists.
Pilz said compounding pharmacies may also register as outsourcing facilities to produce larger batches of medications and could therefore assign expiration dates to medications.
Documents reviewed by NBC News indicate that five vials of pentobarbital purchased by Texas had a “use by date” of September 2024, but that shelf life was recently extended to May 2026, and three other vials had a “use by date” of September 2024.
But the 20 1-gram vials of pentobarbital that were purchased in September 2024 had an expiration date of April 2025, records show. They were used for the executions of García White in October 2024 and of Steven Nelson, Richard Tabler and Moisés Mendoza in early 2025.
The documents also indicate that the eight 2.5-gram vials of pentobarbital purchased in February expire at the end of this month.
Inventory records reviewed by NBC News show that some of those vials were removed for the execution of Matthew Johnson in May, but do not reflect whether that same supply was used in the execution of Blaine Milam in September.
It is also unclear whether drugs that were about to expire would have been used in the Oct. 16 execution of Robert Roberson, who was about to become the 597th person executed in Texas.
Roberson was convicted of the 2002 death of his two-year-old daughter, Nikki, and would be the first prisoner in the country to be executed in connection with “shaken baby syndrome.”
With just days to spare, an appeals court last week halted the execution based on another case of disputed evidence surrounding the medical diagnosis, meaning Texas would not be able to use that expiring supply of pentobarbital since no other inmate is scheduled to die this month and the next execution is not until late January.
“With the stay of Mr. Roberson’s execution, the manufactured drugs that we believe are currently in his possession, which expire at the end of October, have to be disposed of,” said Levin, the death penalty attorney.
He added that Roberson’s case — now the third time his execution has been stayed — underscores the biggest challenge for states when seeking manufactured drugs for lethal injection.
“It’s a constant game of use it or lose it or extend the ‘use after date’ for the umpteenth time, including the hundreds of thousands of dollars they spent to get it,” he said. “The expiration date of illegally purchased drugs should not be the driving force behind executions in Texas.”
