Nembutal, an old friend of mine from other days, turns out to be pentobarbital, US executioners' drug of choice for lethal injections. Now a problem has arisen. The licensed manufacturer refuses to allow it to be sold for that use, and so it comes about that the state of Missouri, which has an inmate, Michael Taylor, on death row waiting to be dispatched this month, has no stocks to hand and can't get the wherewithal. Unable to source the real thing, they looked around for someone to cook it up for them. Homemade pentobarbital can apparently give you a very nasty death – on top of the already nasty death you get from judicial execution. In a recently recorded use of it, the victim's heart continued to beat for ten minutes after he had stopped breathing; last month another recipient of such an injection said after 20 seconds: 'I feel my whole body burning.'