The Texas Department of Criminal Justice uses 3 drugs in its administration of the death penalty: sodium pentothal, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride.
Sodium pentothal is a barbiturate that until about 10 years ago was the most widely used medication for inducing general anesthesia. (It has since been displaced somewhat by newer drugs that cause fewer side effects upon awakening. For obvious reasons, that isn't a concern for death penalty cases.)
It is important to understand that sodium pentothal is given to an inmate 1st to render him completely unconscious and insensible to pain. For example, a normal surgical dose for a man weighing 220 pounds would be about 300 milligrams. Yet for lethal injection, the inmate receives 3 grams - or 10 times the normal amount based on body weight.
I can attest with all medical certainty that anyone receiving that massive dose will be under anesthesia.
The 2nd of the three drugs given in a lethal injection is pancuronium bromide - the subject of so much recent scrutiny.
Pancuronium bromide and its newer cousins are members of a class called neuromuscular blockers. Simply put, those drugs paralyze the body's skeletal muscles. In a lethal injection, the effect of the drug is to relax the chest wall muscles and the diaphragm in the now unconscious inmate.
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The last chemical in the three-drug lethal injection formula is potassium chloride, whose immediate effect in the dose given is to stop the heart and hasten death. In large doses given rapidly to a patient who is awake, the medication would cause pain in the arm due to irritation of the veins through which it courses. But for the sake of emphasis, we aren't talking here about a patient who is awake or even remotely conscious at this point.
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The current argument against executions seems to hinge on the supposition that the second and 3rd drugs in this regimen would be cruel to someone who could feel them - and, to be candid, that assertion is true, since the pancuronium would cause a patient to be paralyzed and unable to respond to the pain of the potassium injection.
Yet for that argument to be valid in any way, you must ignore the 1st drug in the process - sodium pentothal - that (1) renders the inmate to be completely unconscious, (2) has been used for decades to induce anesthesia in surgical patients and (3) is given in doses far exceeding what is needed to keep the inmate from being aware or feeling anything.
Regardless of one's feelings about the death penalty as a moral punishment, as a deterrent or whether it is meted out fairly - this latest objection has neither logic nor science to support it. If it did, it would follow that anesthesiologists and nurse anesthetists in this country have been treating patients "unconstitutionally" for decades.
State Sen. Kyle Janek (Republican, Houston), an anesthesiologist
http://www.cjlf.org/deathpenalty/TXInjection.htm
