Another issue: It's hard to access. “No pharmaceutical company wants to be associated with a drug that kills people,” Dr. Groner says. Because of this, officials have had to get creative when getting their hands on the drug. In Texas, executioners had to turn to compounding pharmacies , which typically make alternative versions of drugs that are already on the market. But if the pharmacies create a version of pentobarbital that isn’t potent enough or that’s contaminated in some way, it could lead to a botched execution. This happened on more than one occasion in Texas: William Rayford writhed on his gurney and Anthony Allen Shore said as he died that he could feel the drugs “burning,” according to a Buzzfeed News investigation. “We used to burn people at the stake, now we just do it chemically,” Dr. Groner says.