"Why I'm for a moratorium on lethal injections," is the OpEd by Dr. Joel Zivot, M.D., in today's USA Today. Here's the beginning of this must-read:
I am an anesthesiologist, and I possess the knowledge on how to render any person unconscious. You may call it sleep, but it is nothing of the sort.
I learned my craft with the use of sodium thiopental, a drug in the barbiturate class. To witness it for the first time, to watch as it raced into a vein, and in a moment, rendered the patient unconscious, was nothing short of astounding. In those moments, my job was to be reassuring and comforting, for I can imagine no greater moment of trust between a doctor and a patient.
Sodium thiopental is no longer in my pharmacology toolbox. Hospira, the last company to manufacture the drug, stopped making it to protest its use in carrying out the death penalty.
So other drugs have been substituted. One of them will be used Tuesday, when Oklahoma is scheduled to execute by lethal injection Johnny Dale Black, who was convicted of murder.
An executioner and the condemned are not the same as a doctor and a patient, though it is easy to see how similarities can be drawn. Had this supposed similarity not been noticed, the death penalty in the U.S. would likely not have survived. Instead, lethal injection created an illusion of humane, professional execution. But the executioners are not doctors, and it's been well established that the executions themselves are not humane.
Related posts are in the physician and lethal injection category indexes.
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