Harvard Physician Warns Pharmacies That Supplied Execution Drugs Are Now Selling Weight-Loss Jabs

One in eight American adults took a GLP-1 weight-loss drug such as Ozempic or Mounjaro in 2025, and much of that supply came from compounding pharmacies. In a September 2026 op-ed for the Houston Chronicle, Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Rebecca Weintraub warns that some of the pharmacies making these drugs have also secretly supplied states with the drugs used in executions.

Pharmaceutical companies and compounding pharmacies do not want medicines designed to save lives used to end them. But a small number of “bad actors” have taken on the work. Dr. Weintraub notes that supplying execution drugs can breach state and federal law, conflicts with pharmacy professional standards, and exposes a pharmacy to litigation, lasting reputational damage and even the loss of its insurance. To draw pharmacies in regardless, states promise them anonymity, which has allowed a small group to operate outside normal regulatory structures.

The violations uncovered at some of these pharmacies are serious. The op-ed cites a Texas pharmacy found to have more than a dozen safety and cleanliness violations, a branch investigated over a patient overdose and sued for dispensing opioids without prescriptions, and a pharmacy that supplied another state’s execution drugs, which was fined for failing to disclose an owner’s misdemeanor charge and recalled mislabeled drugs. All of them kept producing consumer products while making drugs for executions.

Several Texas pharmacies exposed as execution-drug suppliers now advertise compounded weight-loss products, according to Dr. Weintraub. That matters because compounded GLP-1s are already vulnerable: a 2025 pharmacovigilance study found contamination was reported nearly 19 times more often for compounded GLP-1 products than for FDA-approved versions. Since the FDA declared the semaglutide and tirzepatide shortages over, the compounded versions still on sale come from smaller pharmacies overseen by state boards with uneven resources, rather than from FDA-registered outsourcing facilities.

The same secrecy laws that hide execution drug suppliers also hide the rest of their business, so it is impossible to establish whether the facilities making execution drugs are the ones producing contaminated GLP-1 batches. Patients deserve to know who makes their medicines, Dr. Weintraub argues, and regulators need visibility into sourcing. Those basic requirements of drug safety cannot coexist with execution secrecy, and lawmakers must decide whether to protect that secrecy or the health of the millions of Americans it puts at risk.

Rebecca Weintraub, M.D., is an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and an associate physician in the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She is the founding director of the Global Health Delivery Project and leads the Better Evidence Network.