As some states increasingly turn to compounding pharmacies to provide drugs needed for lethal injections, an online petition seeking to change the American Pharmacists Association’s code of ethics is gaining steam. Activists see it as a way to bring more pressure to bear in their fight to end the death penalty for good.
According to some activists, it’s a sentence that could change everything about the death penalty.
It’s a sentence, activists say, that’s missing from the ethics code of the American Pharmacists Association (APhA), and the omission is raising serious questions for the organization and the role of the Hippocratic Oath in pharmacists’ work.
An ethics code omission? According to some protesters,
led by progressive activist Kelsey Kauffman, part of the difficulty may
be with APhA’s ethics code, which—unlike those of other major medical
groups, such as the
American Medical Association and the
American Nurses Association
[PDF]—does not specifically prohibit its members from assisting in
executions. While such a code provision would not be legally binding, it
could make pharmacists who currently compound lethal injection drugs
less willing to do so—if, for example, it would result in their losing
their professional certification.
That’s why
the nonprofit petition site SumOfUs
has launched a campaign to get the association to add a prohibition to
its code. The petition, which argues that “the association could help
put a stop to the manufacturing and supplying of drugs used for lethal
injections and help end the use of the death penalty in the U.S. once
and for all,” has been signed by more than 36,000 people and has gained
support from the American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP, and other
civil rights groups.
Source: NOW Associations, April 14, 2014
