Yes, it is. But, I know my cousin (and perhaps your dad) is much less afraid of death as a result.
My apologies. It was not my intention to elicit debate, the error is mine in that I failed to realise I was in GD as opposed to a forum better suited for my response.
Having a general anaesthetic for surgery is painless. And if you are given too much you will die.
This isn’t exactly true; the carotid bodies sense both oxygen and carbon dioxide levels. pH also plays into it, as you said.
I did say “in brief”. I could write a 10, 000 word essay on the regulation of blood gases and the control of ventilation but that would be extravagant, particularly since it’s not even the topic of this thread. The brief response was good enough for the level of explanation required at that point.
You’re confusing carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide.
Excess CO2 is the main way that people know they are suffocating.
It’s been shown with animal tests that if you remove the CO2 from the air, the animal will not notice that you have turned off the oxygen and are filling the air with all nitrogen - the animal gets sleepy, lies down without visible pain and never wakes up.
Carbon monoxide is different in that it binds to the meoglobin in the blood, and stops the oxygen exchange. The effect seems to be the same, the blood, as seen in the lips, turns blue when the blood becomes oxygen deficient.
anyway, as Imasquare says; it must be possible to execute people with little or no pain because anaesthetists routinely render people unconscious with little or no pain, in fact it’s my understanding that the anaesthetist has to focus quite strongly on trying not to inadvertently kill the patient.
Stress would be a factor of course; surgical patients enter anaesthesia knowing (or at least hoping) they will wake up again; condemned criminals would not necessarily be able to have the same kind of peace of mind.
So why don’t we, instead of using things that aren’t painless?
[aside] If you like the guillitone, here’s a new use for it http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/fun/sixchix.asp?date=20050609 [/aside]
Well, that’s more of a debate than a question to which a factual answer can be given. However, I feel certain that the ‘punishment’ factor must be in there somewhere.
I’ve always thought this is how capital punishment should be handled as well if you really want a painless death. Once a person is fully under, up the dosage until there are no more brain waves. Preparing for it would be stressful on the criminal, as Mangetout posted, but so is living on death row for 20+ years.
I think you are inappropriately equating “twitching” with pain. I have witnessed death in hundreds (liklely thousands, I don’t have the time/desire to do the math) of animals. Muscle fasciculation is a common post mortem finding as sodium and potassium equilibrate across cell membranes of muscles.
In laboratory animal medicine, regulating agencies consider decapitation as a humane method of death.
That’s pretty much what we do now. The first drug administered during an execution by lethal injection is sodium thiopental (aka, sodium pentothal, “truth serum”), a barbituate anaesthetic. The amount administered is far in excess of the amount that would be given as an anaesthetic (a lethal dose, in fact). But, just to be sure that the condemned doesn’t recover (and thus suffer injury), they follow that up with two additional drugs. They are pancuromium bromide (a muscle relaxant that collapses the lungs) and potassium chloride (stops the heart).
Works for me!
Isn’t that what I said?
As I said, this is not consistent with my first-hand experience. I’m not going to go into detail, but CO and CO2 were not involved.
Max Torque, that’s what I thought logically must happen, but had read of reports where participants of drug-injection executions suffer a fair bit of pain. Your comments combined with a bit of thought (based on almost total ignorance of the subject at hand 
) leads me to think:
A. The death-penalty opponents are exaggerating about the painful aspects of lethal drug execution methods, or
B. It is sometimes very painful, but is the exception to the rule and cannot be totally eliminated, or
C. I did not remember the reports properly.
To me that has to be the most painful part of being executed. The mental stress of the state saying “We’re goning to kill you at 12:01 am on July 19th.” (unless you win some sort of appeal) Well that would drive me nuts. I guess the only way around that is to keep the death sentence secret and then slip some strong poison in the scrambled eggs one morning.
But the entire ritual of the execution, hanging, firing squad, gillotine, lethal injection, or any other method, that ritual of going through a series of steps that lead to the death are, IMHO simply there to cause as much stress on the person.
Anything that destroys the brain in less time than a nerve can fire would be painless. Explosives or a large weight travelling at very high speed would do this. The problem is that it would be messy, but anything non messy will always carry the possibility that sufficient brain is still active for a short period to be able to feel stimuli which might register as pain.
While I’ve never read an account of foaming at the mouth and bleeding from the eyes (Have you got a cite for that Judge Judy?), I have read that the average death in the gas chamber takes several minutes and that during that time the person seems to be in agony. A doctor actually set up a simple set of signals with a condemned criminal. Either the man was just twitching like crazy from the gas, or he signaled emphatically and repeatedly that death in the gas chamber was extremely painful.
Re Lethal Injection
I have never heard a credible objection.
YOU we’ll kill by stoning. And not the good kind of stoning. 
Well, my CO[sub]2[/sub] suggestion is based on films of pigs being slaughtered. The pigs were let into a chamber below ground level. There was food there as an incitement, and the narrator said that CO[sub]2[/sub] levels were increased over a five minute time until the pigs fell asleep. The pigs showed no distress at all. The narrator described a procedure where an individual pig was removed after loosing consciousness and revived with pure oxygen, and showed no ill effects whatsoever. Workers were standing on walkways above the open topped chamber, and had no equipment at all, and were unaffected by the process. Fans blowing ordinary air into the chamber were the only method used to allow the workers to go down and retrieve the pigs for processing.
This film was made in the late 1960’s, and we presented as a report of humane slaughter techniques used by that company at the behest of animal cruelty monitors. I did not check the authenticity of the report, but find no particular reason to doubt it. Victims of CO[sub]2[/sub] inundation in South America a few decades ago did not even wake up, but simply died in their sleep, in the hundreds. There was no evidence that they were ever aware that something was happening.
Can I categorically state that no possible stimulus exists that a condemned person would feel that might cause him distress? Of course not. Pigs cannot report such trivia. But they did not stop eating until they lay down to sleep. There was very little movement after that, and nothing I saw that would make me think the pigs were doing anything other than what I do when I lay down and sleep. I did not notice pigs gasping. No one reported such an observation, although I cannot rule out that no one gave a damned if the pigs gasped a bit as they died. They looked to me as if they just fell asleep.
Tris