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Medical experts shocked by Tennessee team’s ‘malpractice’ in Christa Pike’s failed execution
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2026
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I'm guessing no licensed doctor or nurse or medicine practitioner of any sorts would have wanted to take place in that, so they took whatever muppets they could find?
No need to guess, that's exactly what happens. No ethical medical professional participates in executions.
Including the drugs that are used. Which reputable pharmaceutical company wants to be associated with producing the drugs for lethal injection?
The drugs stopped being produced in 2011. So what remains has expired at this point.
So even if we consider they have stocks, those meds will not work as intended.
Expired meds can have a lot of differences. Sometimes they are fine for years after expiration. Sometimes they become less effective. Sometimes they have wildly different effects and interactions and the medication breaks down.
Unless you actually know the shelf life of pentobarbital, that argument isn't even worth making.
All drugs are required to have an expiration date. Drug companies will only go so far out on that time period in order to cover their asses. Plus, it's bad for business if you're selling meds put people could still safely use them 20 years later and don't need to buy fresh stock. Pentobarbital could start losing potency in 5 years, or it could be shelf stable for 100.
Regardless, this wasn't the drugs fault. A flipping 24 gauge needle. Oof. I'm just an EMT and I know that's way too stupidly small. Not to mention all the other signs.
This is absolutely true, but i would challenge the assertion about making people throw away good meds being bad for business.
The law passed in 1979 requiring manufacturers to provide an expiration date of when they could guarantee a drug was still safe and fully effective did not require that the manufacturers do any long term tests, to establish accurate dates though. Many companies slapped a one year date on the labels and called it a day.
They could guarantee a year with then current testing protocols and if people had to toss their perfectly good meds and buy more, then that would just be good for company profits.
The US military keeps huge stockpiles of medicines on hand. Faced with throwing away millions of dollars of meds every year they commissioned a study.
Pharmaceutical companies were happy to tellpeople throw away medicines years before they needed to.
I think your only agreeing with me.
John Criscio, president of Absolute Standards, said the company ceased producing pentobarbital in December 2020.
Absolute Standards, says it needs to be refrigerated and has a shelf life of 2 1/2 years.
As I've started above, that doesn't necessarily mean it starts going bad after 30 months.
Expired pentobarbital likely played a role in the failed execution. Assuming they kept the vials in perfect, dark storage and it's formulated with stabilizers, it could last a long time, many years, but if any of those perfect conditions for pharmaceutical storage aren't met, that time drops to a couple years max. I highly doubt prisons have ideal storage for their lethal injection medication, especially because no ethical medical professional will be involved.
Did you even read the article? They blew out her veins and never administered it into her blood stream. Her stating that her arm felt like it was on fire and that the administors were having a hard time pushing saline is proof to the fact. It's not designed to kill you if it isn't injected into the blood stream. The old stock 100% had nothing to do with it.
Ideally yes, but
I wouldn't put it past some of them to volunteer for a job like this because they get a chubby from causing suffering to patients.
My sons gf is in nursing school right now and she and I were talking about the people in her cohort who are anti vax and the overlap with the overt religious right and virtue signaling and “care culture” there’s absolutely a whole group of people within medicine exactly as you described who have values completely at odds with the hippocratic oath
My wife’s residency director is anti vax. This is a person in charge of teaching new doctors. She’s also a super Christian originally from Idaho.
Absolutely disgusting.
there is a strange relationship between nursing and right wing christians, something about thier only JOB for these people.
Nurses i can see that, because places are so short for nurses, they sometime let certain types of nurses thoguh the cracks.
There are doctors who take their Hypocritic Oath more seriously than their Hippocratic Oath
Your average phlebotomist will be far better than most doctors and nurses at putting in a line
They easily could have found a phlebotomist who needed the extra money. This is simply incompetence. Unbelievable levels of it
Is it actually all that easy to find medical professionals who don't have qualms about killing people as a side gig from their day job of healing people?
they dont, they have some janky "medical staff' to do it. likely not even taken a phelbotomy course. nurses and doctors arnt going to risk thier LICENSE and reputation, they can make more money in private pratices without the potential to get blackballed.