Punitive Pill: Tracing the Life-Death Worlds of Sodium Pentobarbital

• Applicant: Marcos Freire de Andrade Neves, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 550967124

The project aims to explore the complex moral, socio-cultural, and politico-legal landscape surrounding the use of sodium pentobarbital (SP) in state-sanctioned executions in Harris County, United States. It investigates how the pharmaceutical, originally intended for medical purposes, has become entangled in the death penalty system. Against the background of the historical shift that turned pharmaceuticals into tools of punishment since lethal injection’s introduction in the U.S. in 1977, the project seeks to understand SP’s role in the governance of life and death, challenging traditional views on pharmaceutical efficacy, safety, and the relation between care and violence. The use of the pharmaceutical sodium pentobarbital in executions reveals a moral economy of life structured along gendered and ethnic-racialised lines, and shaped by state, medical, and market forces. By framing SP as a death-inducing technology and highlighting its connection with punishment and coerced death, the proposed project aims to uncover the tensions and intersections that animate this moral economy, which disproportionately exposes certain bodies and groups to the risk of state-sanctioned executions. The proposed project employs a mixed-methods approach, combining assemblage ethnography, chemo-ethnography, participant observation, and interviews, to shed light on the implications of deliberately using pharmaceuticals to produce death as a means of punishment by state institutions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants