The state of Ohio, which last put someone to death in January 2014, has delayed all of its scheduled executions again, until at least 2017, the Associated Press reports. The prisons department announced that it has run out of supplies of lethal injection drugs and hasn’t been able to acquire new chemicals.

Altogether, 25 inmates’ execution dates have been rescheduled to January 2017 through August 2019.

In a statement, the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction said that it “continues to seek all legal means to obtain the drugs necessary to carry out court ordered executions, but over the past few years it has become exceedingly difficult to secure those drugs because of severe supply and distribution restrictions.”

An unprecedented two-drug combination was used to execute convicted rapist and killer Dennis McGuire in January last year. The procedure took 26 minutes, through which he reportedly gasped and snorted in what his lawyer later called a “failed, agonizing experiment by the state of Ohio.”

Photo credit: AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.