Of course if you administer such drugs in the doses commonly used in anesthetic procedure then they are relatively safe. But if you give 1000 times that dose… that’s what they call a lethal injection.
They put down elephants with these drugs. A human is no match.
No,no,no,no no!
As I have cited above, the two most commonly used anaesthetic drugs for general anaesthesia are relatively safe in overdose- much safer than Tylenol! Their effect is not linear but tails off as the receptor sites are fully blockaded at a certain blood concentration- continue increase does not cause further sedation.
When death occur under anaesthetic it is not overdose of the anaesthetic agents, but individual abreaction to drugs or failure of respiration or of oxygenation or cardiac arrest or arrhythmia or hyperthermia secondary to underlying problems with physical condition.
Anaesthetics are not reliable poisons.
They put elephants down with barbiturates which are no longer used as anaesthetics. Barbiturates used to be part of the judicial killing process in most sates, but is less available now. Anyway it still requires either a patent IV catheter into a major vein or long needle injection into the body cavity. Hence it has the same problems as current abominations.
I have an outdated scuba diving certification, but I’ve never studied the standard diving dress. That said, if the Mythbusters merely sealed off the line, the pig corpse would be fine. The ~10 atmospheres of air pressure inside the suit would equal the ~10 atmospheres of water pressure. But since they permitted air to escape on the surface, the pig was crushed.
I may have merely misunderstood you initially though.
my proposal (which I posted on halfbakery) is the randomly-timed exploding helmet.
Half the suffering of execution is knowing it’s about to happen, the terror of it all.
So my proposal is a helmet, filled with explosives, that the condemned wears, and continues to live in a special large prison yard, where he’s allowed more entertainment than usual. The helmet is timed to explode randomly within like three weeks. No one knows when it will go off.
So he goes on living happily, until all of a sudden one moment his conciousness ends in an instant.
I would much prefer that if I were to be executed
Much of the argument used by death penalty opponents that “the death penalty causes suffering” is just their first tactic out of many.
If a completely humane and painless method of execution were invented, they’d quickly switch to their next argument: “It’s still uncivilized.” “It’s philosophically wrong.” “It’s unnecessary.” Etc.
In response to Velocity’s post:
Indeed. Ultimately I think it’s raw emotionalism
What lefty types don’t seem to understand that just because their emotionalism leads to “enlightened” or less “base” policies, as they could perhaps be described, doesn’t mean that they’re actually more mature emotions/ideas/policies. Emotionalism is a problem as a reasoning method period. You need to be able to work logic into your understandings
Well, perhaps his head will explode as he tries to reconcile conflicting information.
My contention was that modern anaesthetics are unlikely to result in death even if in overdose.
You may consider this idiolectic, but I now have a Woody Allen introducing Marshall McLuhan moment:
““It’s fair to say that those are drugs that would not expeditiously achieve (death),” said Daniel Nyhan, a professor and interim director of the anesthesiology department at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.”
What about morphine? One of the most common anasthetics and/or painkillers out there, and yet people overdose on it all the time.
There is your problem. Morphine is an analgesic, not an anaesthetic. Anaesthetics are not analgesics and analgesics are not anaesthetics.
Analgesics combat the experience of pain currently being experienced with ideally minimum reduction of consciousness.
Anaesthetics allow painful procedures to be carried out on the body with minimum subsequent effects of the procedure.
There is some crossover with drugs that have dual effects, but the categories are largely mutually exclusive.
Additionally medical morphine is far less dangerous than street awareness would suggest. In large enough amounts it will cause respiratory depression, but this is variable between patients and still involves the introduction of the medication in a patent vein.
This whole argument started because of the false claim that because when you have an operation a combination of intra muscular, oral and inhaled drugs leads to loss of consciousness, THEN an overdose of this would kill you. As the Professor above says, this is not the case- which is what I have been saying for the last few days.
Bump for any sense that I may be owed an apology regarding the effectiveness of an anaesthetic as a judicial killing agent, now that my view is clearly supported by a Professor of Anaesthetics.
I don’t have a bone in this fight, but as I read it the physician was referring to a particular cocktail of drugs administered to a particular person on death row. He was not claiming that there were no combination of anaesthetics that would achieve death. From the same article: [INDENT]“This doesn’t actually sound like a botched execution. This actually sounds like a typical scenario if you used that drug combination,” said Karen Sibert, an anesthesiologist and associate professor at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Sibert was speaking on behalf of the California Society of Anesthesiologists.[/INDENT] -------
More generally, I suspect it would be pretty straightforward for an M.D. to design a medical regimen that would achieve death. A prison employee with only high school biology (like many of us) would have greater difficulty.
It’s rather psychologically needy for someone to bump a thread because they think they’re owed an apology.
You’re not because your claim is still wrong, and frankly kind of absurd.
If anyone here has undergone Ketamine Infusion Therapy, I would like to chat.