It’s good to see Nevada and Nebraska Department of Corrections thinking outside the box.
Outside the coffin you might say.
San Quentin State Prison in California, home of California's death row, where infamous criminals such as Scott Peterson and Richard Allan Davis are kept.
It may sound a bit macabre, but I am intrigued to see that both these states have learned something from the opiate abuse community.
They are both planning to use Fentanyl as lethal injection for executions. That business they were having so much trouble with, because the manufacturers of thiopental and pentobarbital, the barbiturate narcotics usually used to render the victim unconscious, will not supply them for this grizzly task.
It seems it took a bunch of heroin, or narcotic addicts on the street, inadvertently overdosing on Fentanyl, which is an opiate that is 100 times more potent than morphine, to show how it’s done.
Having done a stint in anesthetics, where, as any anesthetist will tell you, the name of the game is to hold the patient as near death as you dare – while trying not to let the surgeon finish the job – I marvel at why it has been such a problem.
There are a multitude of different anesthetics, so I don’t know why it should be so difficult finding some suitable cocktail to execute prisoners.
But these progressive and creative state’s Departments of Correction have solved the problem.
Fentanyl has the added advantage that it is being manufactured illicitly and smuggled in from China (reputedly) and can be bought on the streets for a much better price than if some avaricious pharmaceutical company is in on the act.
