CT Company Accused Of Secretly Making Lethal Injection Drugs: Reports

HAMDEN, CT — The state attorney general is investigating a Hamden-based chemical company accused for at least the second time of secretly supplying the federal government with a lethal injection drug, according to CTPost.

The company, Absolute Standards Inc., advertises itself as producing over 2,000 calibration chemical products designed to assist with the testing and analysis of instruments used in a lab.

But despite not being registered with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration or as a controlled substances manufacturer with the Drug Enforcement Administration, the company also makes pentobarbital — a drug used for lethal injection — for the Justice Department, according to claims published in Reuters in 2020 and resurfaced in a recent Last Week Tonight with John Oliver segment.

According to the Sunday John Oliver report — which cited public records and documents as well as a "confidential source" — the company may have supplied the federal Bureau of Prisons and the state of Arizona with the fatal drug.

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

Absolute Standards applied to be registered as a bulk manufacturer of pentobarbital on Sept. 29. 2018 and again on Aug. 25, 2021, according to Drug Enforcement Administration notices.

The first notice stated that the company planned to bulk manufacture the substance for distribution to customers, while the 2021 one said the company planned to bulk manufacture the controlled substances "for internal use and sale to its customers." Reuters noted in 2020 that Aug. 2018 is around the time a Justice Department court filing stated that it contracted with a new pentobarbital supplier.

Aside from use in lethal injections, pentobarbital can treat tension, anxiety, nervousness, insomnia, epilepsy, and other seizures, and can be used to help patients relax before surgery, according to DailyMed.

A short biography provided by the New Haven American Chemical Society said that Absolute Standard's general director Stephen Arpie, M.S., has been working at the company for 18 years. He has been involved with the ACS-New Haven Section for years and regularly serves on the judging panel at the ACS-New Haven Student Research Symposiums, the society said.

When asked about the claims in 2020, Arpie told Reuters that they "don't know what the final intended use" of their products is going to be.

But that's beside the point, Oliver noted during the segment Sunday.

"Absolute Standards' business is making chemicals for calibrating machines, which is to say, not making drugs for human consumption," Oliver said. "But we’re pretty sure they're making execution drugs as a side hustle, and we think our case is pretty strong."