Fentanyl for Lethal Injection: Tennessee Learns the Cartels Have Better Customer Service

Why Fentanyl for Lethal Injection Keeps Stalling, According to Experts Who Say Pfizer Won’t Sell It, Nebraska Can’t Reorder It and Tennessee Can’t Find the Next Page of the Binder

NASHVILLE, Tennessee — America has a drug so dangerous that cops handle it like a live grenade, and a government so slow that it can’t get one legal vial of the stuff into a prison on schedule. That’s the whole story, really. But folks keep asking the follow-up question over fences, in comment sections and at the pharmacy counter: why don’t we just use fentanyl for lethal injection?

The question came roaring back this week after Christa Pike survived Tennessee’s September 30 attempt to execute her. As NPR reported on the failed execution, officials administered two doses of a drug meant to be fatal, and Governor Bill Lee answered by canceling the state’s remaining execution this year and ordering a third-party review. The Tennessee Department of Correction said it followed every step of its protocol, and, according to CNN’s account of what happened, that the protocol allows nothing beyond what was carried out. So the contingency plan, as written, was an ambulance. The state had a plan for everything, except the thing that happened.

Fentanyl for Lethal Injection Isn’t a Hypothetical, Because Nebraska Already Did It

Here’s the part that surprises the armchair experts. Somebody already tried it. On August 14, 2018, Nebraska became the first state in the country to use fentanyl in an execution, a development The Washington Post covered as a national first. Carey Dean Moore was pronounced dead at 10:47 a.m., according to the Chicago Sun-Times, after a four-drug combination that was also new to the state. The Death Penalty Information Center’s record of the case notes it was Nebraska’s first execution in 21 years.

So the answer to the headline question is that we did, once. It worked in the narrow, administrative sense that the paperwork got finished. Then the second half of the answer showed up, and it had nothing to do with chemistry.

Why Fentanyl for Lethal Injection Isn’t the Standard: The Supplier Won’t Take the Order

Fresenius Kabi, a German drugmaker, sued to stop the Nebraska execution, claiming the state had improperly gotten hold of its products, as Newsweek detailed before the execution. A judge let it proceed anyway. But Nebraska’s own prisons director admitted in an affidavit that lethal injection drugs are difficult, if nearly impossible, to obtain. That’s not a protocol. That’s a yard sale with a countdown clock.

Nevada had its own fentanyl plan, and a drugmaker’s lawsuit helped stop it at the last minute. Pfizer, meanwhile, ordered its distributors not to sell certain drugs to prisons, as The Marshall Project reported. Think about what that means. A company that exists to keep people alive looked at the government’s order form and took “first, do no harm” literally. Pfizer read the Hippocratic oath and, unlike the state, actually followed the protocol.

“I ordered hemorrhoid cream for a hospital system for forty years and never once needed a lawyer,” said Dale Prewitt, a retired pharmacy buyer in Omaha. “These people can’t buy the one product they’ve been promised in writing. If I ran my shop like that, we’d have been out of business by Tuesday.”

Fentanyl for Lethal Injection and the Cartel Customer Service Problem

Nobody’s praising the drug cartels here. It’s a horror story, and the efficiency is the horror. But it’s hard not to notice that the black market ships by the ton, hits its delivery windows and handles returns with a ruthlessness that would make a FedEx regional manager weep, while a state corrections department with a budget, a building, a legal team and a three-ring binder can’t close a single sale. The underground economy has no FDA, no appropriations committee and no procurement office, and it still gets the product where it needs to go. The government has all three and can’t get a drugmaker to answer an email. The cartel delivers on time and under budget, which is more than you can say for the DMV, and the DMV isn’t even trying to kill anybody.

That’s the libertarian punchline, and it writes itself. When a state holds a monopoly on the thing, there’s no competitor to blame, no customer to lose and no incentive to get it right. A business that failed twice in one afternoon would be sued, shuttered or sold. A state agency gets a review, a new binder and a bigger line item. The department didn’t fail, it simply committeed the problem until it stopped moving.

Experts Say Fentanyl for Lethal Injection Has a Second Flaw, and It Isn’t the Drug

Even the supporters of the idea run into a wall of doctors and lawyers. A Fordham law professor who studies lethal injection told AFP that states reached for fentanyl because of a drug shortage, not because of scientific analysis, according to the Inquirer’s report. And an emergency medicine professor told The Marshall Project that Nevada’s fentanyl protocol didn’t make much sense. When the experts and the lawyers agree on something, you know it’s either a miracle or a mess.

The federal government, notably, looked at the same idea and blinked. Reuters reported that the Justice Department weighed fentanyl while preparing to resume executions, and then went with pentobarbital instead. That’s the same pentobarbital Tennessee just used. So the government spent years telling Americans that fentanyl was a national emergency, privately considered it as a state tool, decided against it, and picked the drug that just did the thing it wasn’t supposed to do. It’s the policy equivalent of choosing a fork because the spoon was too dangerous, then eating soup.

“They spend billions to keep this stuff out of my neighborhood, and then they spend a committee’s worth of time asking whether they should buy some,” said Brenda Kowalczyk of the Tri-County Taxpayers Alliance. “My tax dollars are on both sides of that syringe, and somehow neither one is working. We need to nip this in the butt before the budget hearing.”

In fairness, it’s a tough hit to get done. Every state that has tried to get a quick fix has run into the same wall: lawyers, shortages and suppliers with a conscience. The state is trying to hit the target, but the target keeps hiring counsel.

What Fentanyl for Lethal Injection Says About the Rest of Big Government

Here’s where the joke gets a little less funny. Washington and the statehouses have asked citizens to trust them with a staggering list of things: the health care system, the school lunch line, the border, the tax code and the power over life and death. The test case in Tennessee just showed that they can’t reliably stock a closet. Every chart, flowchart and “established protocol” turned out to be a binder with no page for the moment the plan stops working. And the officials responsible, naturally, followed it. The state found itself in a pill of spills, and the whole effort was all in vein.

Strip the jokes away and a woman is in a hospital, in critical condition according to her attorneys. A family has waited thirty years for a sentence that was supposed to be carried out. A governor is waiting on a review. Whatever you think about capital punishment, and people of good faith think very different things about it, one conclusion should survive the punchlines. A government that claims the power to end a life ought to be able to prove it can do the job competently, openly and under the law. One that can’t buy the supplies, hold the contract or follow its own flowchart hasn’t earned the benefit of the doubt on anything else it wants to do with a clipboard.

15 Humorous Observations About Fentanyl for Lethal Injection

1. America spent a decade warning that a few specks of fentanyl can kill, then discovered that getting the government to legally buy any is harder than getting a parking permit.
2. Nebraska is the only state to run a fentanyl execution and then admit it couldn’t reorder the supplies, which makes it the first state to hold a one-time clearance sale on capital punishment.
3. The cartel has a supply chain. The state has a binder. The binder has a table of contents. The table of contents has no entry for “what happens next.”
4. Pfizer looked at the world’s most infamous opioid and said, “Not like that.” Corporate ethics have never been so selective.
5. Somewhere a procurement officer is telling a judge the state “acquired the drugs lawfully,” which is also what every guy on every used car lot says.
6. A four-drug protocol is just a two-drug protocol with an assistant manager.
7. The government wants one drug to do one job, and the drug industry wants nothing to do with it. It’s the most American group project in history.
8. The word “protocol” now appears in every failed execution statement, right after “followed” and right before “unfortunately.”
9. If a European export ban can create an American drug shortage, picture what it could do to the toaster oven supply.
10. The Eighth Amendment bans cruel and unusual punishment, which is why states keep hunting for a method that’s neither cruel nor unusual. Good luck with that.
11. Tennessee’s emergency contingency plan turned out to be a hospital, the only part of the protocol that worked as designed.
12. Somewhere a consultant is billing $400 an hour to recommend a Plan C.
13. Every time a state tries a new execution drug, a lawyer’s lake house gets a new porch.
14. A fentanyl-only protocol would simply move the failure from the injection room to the shipping department, which is where all government projects go to die.
15. The most reliable lethal drug supply in America is still the one with no ethics, no appropriations committee and no binder, which is the darkest compliment ever paid to the free market.

On September 30, 2026, Tennessee tried to execute Christa Pike, now 50, who was convicted in 1996 of first-degree murder for the killing of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a classmate, in 1995. Pike received two doses of pentobarbital and survived, and her attorney Randall Spivey told reporters afterward that she was still alive. Governor Bill Lee, who had denied her clemency petition days earlier, halted the state’s remaining scheduled execution for 2026 and ordered a third-party review. Pike would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. The questions about fentanyl for lethal injection are rooted in real history: Nebraska used it to execute Carey Dean Moore in August 2018, Nevada’s plan to execute Scott Dozier with it was halted that summer by a drugmaker’s lawsuit, and the Justice Department studied the idea before Attorney General William Barr announced that federal executions would use pentobarbital.

Sources: Fentanyl for Lethal Injection Reporting

• NPR: Tennessee governor halts executions after Christa Gail Pike survives lethal injection
• CNN: Christa Pike execution attempt, what happened
• The Hill: Tennessee governor halts executions after Christa Pike survives two lethal injection attempts
• The Washington Post: Nebraska becomes the first state to use fentanyl in an execution
• Chicago Sun-Times: Nebraska executes first inmate using fentanyl
• Death Penalty Information Center: Nebraska executes Carey Dean Moore
• Newsweek: Who is Carey Dean Moore
• The Marshall Project: Nevada plans to use fentanyl in upcoming execution
• NPR: Fentanyl and the death penalty
• Reuters via Yahoo News: U.S. government weighed using fentanyl for executions
• Inquirer: US states consider using powerful fentanyl to execute inmates

Disclaimer for This Fentanyl for Lethal Injection Humor

This is American satire. It’s American satirical journalism built around the documented failed execution of Christa Pike, Tennessee’s suspension of its remaining 2026 executions, and the real history of fentanyl in U.S. lethal injection debates. The idea that fentanyl should become a standard lethal injection drug is the premise of the joke, not a policy proposal, a medical recommendation or a statement of government policy. The quoted spokespeople are comedic characters. Nothing here is legal or medical advice.

For more British government dysfunction served with a straight face, visit prat.uk.

Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!