Medicine man said no to death drug

There was nothing extraordinary in his appearance, a clean striped shirt, trousers, pointed leather shoes and receding hairline. In fact, on any ordinary day, he could have easily disappeared among the businessmen of Borivali. But today, Navneet Verma stands out among the rest, for taking a decision simply on ethical grounds to stop exporting his company-manufactured sodium thiopental to the United States.

“Listed in the Essential Drugs List of World Health Organisation, sodium thiopental is an anesthetics used globally,” a fact that Navneet knew very well. What he did not know was that the drug was also used as the first of three drugs administered during most lethal injection to kill the criminals on death rows. “I had no idea what they were doing with the product,” claims Navneet, owner of Kayem Pharmaceuticals, from his cosy Borivali office.

Kayem was supplying the drug to the ministry of defence in Angola when the director of a jail in Nebraska approached the firm in 2010 and offered to help supply it to the US market.

“I knew that the drugs were being used at prisons as I was the one who authorised the invoices. I just did not know they were used for the death penalty,” he adds. Perhaps Navneet would have never known had he not been contacted by Reprieve, a British organisation that advocates the abolition of death penalty.

“I had dispatched 500 vials to Nebraska, which got cleared by the end of February of 2011. Next, I got a mail from a gentleman named Clive Rutherford, who informed me what the drugs were being used for. He sounded like the custodian of the entire world and almost threatened me,” recalls Navneet.

Navneet further added, “However, by the time I got to know about it, the contract with South Dakota jail had been almost finalised. So I decided to jack up the price by 50 times, so that they would reject the deal. But they agreed and sent me the money the very next day. Meanwhile, the Attorney General of South Dakota had sent me an official mail declaring that the drug would not be used for execution purpose. So, I decided to send them the drug.”

And now that he has stopped selling the drug to the US, it seems that the country is having a scarcity. On April 29, an Oklahoma prison’s experiment with a mixture of drugs to execute one of their prisoners resulted in the man spending 43 minutes writhing and gasping in pain before he died of a heart attack, and not of the lethal injection administered to him.

“The problem,” Navneet says, “is that the US doesn’t want to dirty its own hands. It  banned the drug in the US, and now, wants us to produce the drug and supply it to them.”

The drug has been much in debate earlier and as a consequence, is banned in European Union and the US. But in India, it is used as an anesthetic, therefore, it is not illegal to manufacture the product here.

“Being a Hindu, I believe I shouldn’t participate in such a wrongdoing. Americans are a bunch of psychopaths; they keep guns under their pillows. Andher nagri chaupat raja. So, let them deal with their own problems,” he says.

Navneet has now stopped manufacturing the drug. “I am a common man with common interests. So I realised that there was no point getting into trouble,” says the 54-year-old. Kayem now manufactures generic medicines, sildenafil citrate commonly known as Viagra.

As he tried explaining the corrupt Indian bureaucracy, an inviting image of Sunny Leone popped up on his computer screen, which for a blink made us all awkward, and then he cracked up, sending his 2-year-old British cocker spaniel sitting quietly till now into a fit of surprised barking.