GESTIÓN EN SALUD PÚBLICA: BioEdge: US states could use nitrogen to execute prisoners

domingo, 20 de mayo de 2018

BioEdge: US states could use nitrogen to execute prisoners

BioEdge: US states could use nitrogen to execute prisoners

Bioedge

US states could use nitrogen to execute prisoners

by Michael Cook | 20 May 2018 | 1 comment

Underground methods of illegal assisted suicide could be used as a model for capital punishment in the United States. The New York Times reports that states are looking for alternative methods of executing prisoners after some of them suffered greatly during lethal injections.

One solution is inhaling nitrogen, a method promoted by groups like the Final Exit Network in the US and Exit International in Australia. Nitrogen is not poisonous in itself, but in the absence of oxygen, a person will suffocate painlessly.

Oklahoma, Alabama and Mississippi allow nitrogen to be used for executions. Although there has been no scientific research into its use as a method of dispatching humans, there is anecdotal evidence from industrial accidents and from assisted suicide groups. Apparently it does not lead to the feeling of suffocation which comes from a build-up of carbon dioxide in the lungs.

An Arizona company reportedly has prepared a gas chamber which will work with nitrogen. Its product is called a “euthypoxia chamber” which is supposed to be pain-free and mistake-free. It guaranteed “the demise of any mammalian life within 4 minutes.”

“If and when states begin carrying out executions with nitrogen, it will amount to the same type of experimentation we see in the different variations of lethal injection,” Jen Moreno, a lawyer with Berkeley Law Death Penalty Clinic told the New York Times

Sunday, May 20, 2018

Shusaku Endo may be the greatest Japanese novelist who didn’t win the Nobel Prize. He is best known in the West for his novel Silence, about Christianity in 17th Century Japan, which was recently made into a film by Martin Scorsese. But one of his early novels touches upon the ethics of clinical research. Based upon a historical incident which took place just weeks before the end of World War II, The Sea and Poison relates the moral corruption of doctors who vivisected several American prisoners of war.

It’s hard to get, but well worth reading, as it exemplifies the hazards of research on prisoners. Almost no population is more vulnerable to exploitation by clinical researchers than prisoners. Even if they benefit from the research in some tangential way, a more powerful motivation may be their desire to please prison authorities.

Many bioethicists have written about this difficult ethical issue, but this doesn’t make it any easier to make a decision in practice. Below is an article about proposed clinical trial conducted in prisons to determine whether low-salt diets are healthier. What do you think?