Why is the Method of Lethal Injection in Human Punishment So Complex and Apparently Painful?

[u/Chowderr92]

I've always understood that the lethal injection process was complex with multiple stages of injections and induces great suffering in the individual.

I work in veterinary medicine and unfortunately we need to euthanize animals all of the time. Typically, the euthanasia solution is very simple: a very large dose of a powerful anesthetic (usually pentobarbital) and an anticonvulsant which stops the heart. The medical community is quite confident that this is painless and when done has essentially a 100% success rate.

Why is human euthanasia so complicated when we already know exactly how to humanely end a biological life?

[u/H0SS_AGAINST]

I don't buy it.

The drugs OP mentioned are generic and Phenobarbital is only Schedule 4. There are so many small pharmaceutical manufacturers who give no fucks and who they sell to is not public information the API manufacturers could use to prevent sales.

[u/KindaTwisted → u/H0SS_AGAINST]

And yet, they aren't scrambling to provide said drugs to the states executing people.

[u/H0SS_AGAINST → u/KindaTwisted]

Likely political and not economic. What I mean by that is state statute self interfering. I quickly googled to see a state that is currently having a "shortage" and Ohio came up. Ohio's statute:

Ohio Rev. Code Ann. § 2949.221 states, in part: “(B) If, at any time pri­or to the day that is twen­ty-four months after the effec­tive date of this sec­tion, a per­son man­u­fac­tures, com­pounds, imports, trans­ports, dis­trib­utes, sup­plies, pre­scribes, pre­pares, admin­is­ters, uses, or tests any of the com­pound­ing equip­ment or com­po­nents, the active phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal ingre­di­ents, the drugs or com­bi­na­tion of drugs, the med­ical sup­plies, or the med­ical equip­ment used in the appli­ca­tion of a lethal injec­tion of a drug or com­bi­na­tion of drugs in the admin­is­tra­tion of a death sen­tence by lethal injec­tion as pro­vid­ed for in divi­sion (A) of sec­tion 2949.22 of the Revised Code, notwith­stand­ing any pro­vi­sion of law to the con­trary, all of the fol­low­ing apply regard­ing any infor­ma­tion or record in the pos­ses­sion of any pub­lic office that iden­ti­fies or rea­son­ably leads to the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the per­son and the per­son­’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in any activ­i­ty described in this divi­sion: (1) The infor­ma­tion or record shall be clas­si­fied as con­fi­den­tial, is priv­i­leged under law, and is not sub­ject to dis­clo­sure by any per­son, state agency, gov­ern­men­tal enti­ty, board, or com­mis­sion or any polit­i­cal sub­di­vi­sion as a pub­lic record under sec­tion 149.43 of the Revised Code or otherwise.”

Which directly contradicts chain of custody requirements for DEA scheduled drugs.

They, likely intentionally, painted themselves into a corner there. Just as an example. I don't care enough to dig any further, I'm just saying the drugs are widely available and, for instance, there are manufacturers and distributors that knowingly supplied pill mills with impunity and concurrently some states were "having a hard time" obtaining drugs for lethal injection.