America on the ropes: First GM goes bankrupt and now this…

The past several decades have seen a relentless assault on U.S. leadership. The country, through which more than half of all world trade passed in the years right after World War II, has been battered, beaten, and humbled by a combination of self-inflicted wounds and the emergence of new competitors.

The manufacturing base was gutted. Jobs were shipped overseas. Our leadership in autos, aerospace, telecom, computers, steel and countless other industries was challenged and often lost.

Still, through all this, there were a few areas in which American dominance seemed assured. NASCAR comes to mind. So does Country and Western music. And obesity. And then there’s the lethal injection business…

And now the U.S. standing among the world leaders in that business is under siege. Not only do we rank only fifth on Amnesty International’s capital punishment league tables for the past year — behind China, Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia — but today comes the news that the death penalty business that gives America so much of its swashbuckling charm has suffered yet another blow.

Apparently, we have run out of lethal injection drugs. Worse, in the eyes of both those Americans for whom the term "made in America" still means anything as well as in the view of the members of this country’s death penalty bar, we have been forced to actually import inferior foreign death penalty drugs in order to kill our homegrown, corn-fed American murderers and rapists.

Tuesday, the state of Arizona acknowledged that it has been buying its sodium thiopental from Britain, but quickly moved to assure a concerned public that they were buying only the best quality poisons. The state’s Chief Deputy Attorney General Tim Nelson said, "This drug came from a reputable place. There’s all sorts of wild speculation that it came from a third-world country, and that’s not accurate."

So, breathe easy America… none of those not-quite-deadly-enough Third World drugs for us. (Well, at least most Americans can breathe easier. For those death row inmates in the 35 states that employ the death penalty, the concern is that use of second-rate chemicals will cause the condemned to suffocate if they are not fully knocked out by the out-sourced sodium thiopental as they would have otherwise been if first-rate American products were used. On this basis, a judge in Arizona blocked one execution already… and Kentucky has decided to hold off signing death warrants because its lone remaining dose of the drug passed its sell-by date at the beginning of this month.)

I suppose the good news in this story is that there is still a belief — among this country’s leading executioners and lawyers — that American quality still counts for something. No second best for the people we are putting to death. None of that willy-nilly use of firing squads or stoning or the hangman like you might get in many of the world’s leading death penalty destinations. (Will there be a debate in Iraq about whether or not to use Iraqi-made rope to hang 74-year-old Tariq Aziz, the former foreign minister who was yesterday sentenced to death for his role in the administration of Saddam Hussein? Is this beginning of a new form of subtle protectionism in the important worldwide trade in things that will kill you?)

Also, in the good news department, the one company in the U.S. that makes the drug (one of three different drugs necessary for a high-quality state-sponsored murder in the United States), Illinois-based Hospira (… in which the "Hos" stands for the tender hospital care you expect from a drug company… and the "spira" stands for the respiratory arrest that the drug will ensure its victims do not feel as it happens to them…) does plan to resume production as soon as they work out some raw materials sourcing problems, although they say new supplies won’t be available until the beginning of next year. So, there are some good American jobs being protected. And in the meantime, we can comfort ourselves knowing that we are importing our replacement sodium thiopental from a first-rate, English-speaking, industrial power… albeit one that will commemorate in 4 years the 50th anniversary of its last legal execution, making it one of almost 100 countries in which the barbaric practice has also been made illegal and one of perhaps 130 in which states no longer arrogate onto themselves the right to put their own citizens to death thus leaving decisions of that sort to higher, better-qualified authorities.