CT AG reviewing Hamden company HBO’s John Oliver claims secretly made lethal injection drugs

HARTFORD — Connecticut Attorney General William Tong said Thursday his office is reviewing claims that a Hamden company supplied the federal government and at least one state with a lethal injection drug — information government officials have long sought to keep hidden.

“This is an issue that's been discussed and evaluated, and we're still looking at it," Tong told CT Insider on Thursday.

“I can't speak to any pending review or investigation except to say that we're definitely aware of it and have been focused on it for some time,” he added.

Tong’s comments come after the HBO news comedy show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver reported Sunday that the company, Absolute Standards, may have supplied the federal Bureau of Prisons and the state of Arizona with pentobarbital, a drug used in lethal injections. The report cited public records, court documents and an unnamed “confidential source.”

“Absolute Standards’ business is making chemicals for calibrating machines — which is to say, not making drugs for human consumption,” host John Oliver said in the segment, which HBO posted to YouTube on Thursday. “But we’re pretty sure they’re making execution drugs as a side hustle, and we think our case is pretty strong.”

Connecticut banned any further death sentences in 2012 but did not revoke those already in place. The state Supreme Court revoked those death sentences in 2015.

State Sen. Gary Winfield, D-New Haven, a leading figure in the repeal effort, expressed alarm over the possibility a Connecticut company might be making drugs used for lethal injections elsewhere.

“Clearly having been behind the efforts to repeal the death penalty, I have some concerns about an entity within the state that may be producing the drugs that are used to do that in other places,” Winfield said.

Winfield said Absolute Standards has been on his radar, and his focus is on finding out “what is actually happening” with the company. 

Getting concrete information on whether and how the company has been involved with supplying a lethal injection drug is more complicated than it might seem, according to Winfield.

“Congress has had a difficult time discerning,” he said. “I, as an individual legislator, have had a difficult time. And I don’t think it’s incorrect that the attorney general has had a difficult time, for whatever amount of effort they’ve put into it. So it’s not the case that we can just find out whatever we want to.”

On Friday, State Senator Saud Anwar, D-South Windsor, released a statement saying he wants to see the production of lethal injection drugs banned in Connecticut and will continue his efforts to make that happen.

“As the Senate Chair of the Public Health Committee, I have explored introducing a bill that would restrict sales and production of drugs including pentobarbital in the state of Connecticut. However, the Public Health Committee does not have jurisdiction to stop production of these drugs, and my efforts to move forward were restricted,” Anwar's statement said.

In light of Oliver's report, Anwar said he had “reaffirmed my efforts to make this a priority and will continue working to advance such policy in the near future. Connecticut banned the death sentence more than a decade ago; our state should not be complicit in death sentences elsewhere in the United States.”

Tong declined to provide more details — including when his office started looking into Absolute Standards, what prompted the review, whether he has sent the company a formal inquiry and when his office expects it may be able to disclose more publicly.

“We’ve heard from a number of folks about this issue,” Tong said. “I can't speak to the details of our review of this, but it's been going on for a bit … If people have new facts or information, they should share that with us."

Reached by phone Wednesday, the company referred a request for comment to an email address, which went unanswered. 

On Thursday, a man standing just inside the locked glass front door of Absolute Standards’ Hamden office shouted “no comment” at a CT Insider reporter who visited.

The company’s director, Stephen Arpie, did not respond to an email requesting comment.

In 2020, Arpie told Reuters that he could not say whether pentobarbital produced by his company has been used in executions.

“In many parts of our market, we don't know what the final intended use is going to be,” he reportedly said at the time.

The federal Bureau of Prisons declined to comment.

Drug shortage triggers secrecy

Since 2011, many pharmaceutical companies have cracked down on the use of their drugs in lethal injections, and the European Union has banned the export of drugs for that purpose.

Those bans set off a desperate search for lethal drugs among U.S. prison officials and caused some states to experiment with different drug protocols — some of which used the powerful barbiturate pentobarbital to induce death.

When former U.S. Attorney General William Barr restarted federal executions in 2019 after a 16-year pause, the Bureau of Prisons introduced a one-drug pentobarbital protocol.

The federal government has fought to keep the companies that supply and test its pentobarbital supplies secret from members of Congress, in court filings and in public records requests. Many states have also passed shield laws to keep the names of such companies secret.

Hamden firm long been under scrutiny

The Last Week Tonight segment was not the first suggestion that Absolute Standards may have supplied lethal injection drugs to the federal government.

The company applied to the Drug Enforcement Administration as a “bulk manufacturer” of pentobarbital in August 2018, according to a notice in the Federal Register. That’s around the time the U.S. Department of Justice said in a court filing that it contracted with a new pentobarbital supplier, according to Reuters.

Oliver said on Last Week Tonight that the show’s staff had filed a public records request with the Drug Enforcement Administration for records related to Absolute Standards. He said an agency official told members of the show’s staff twice that the request was taking longer to process because the records “related to the death penalty.”

The Drug Enforcement Administration did not respond to a request for comment from CT Insider on Thursday.

In 2020, the U.S. House Oversight Committee sent Absolute Standards a request for information and documents after redacted records provided by the Department of Justice suggested that the company had “assisted DOJ in securing and/or testing pentobarbital for death penalty executions,” according to the letter.

A spokesperson for the committee declined CT Insider’s request for comment Thursday.