“Anesthetizing the Public Conscience: Lethal Injection and Animal Euthanasia”, Alper 2008: Alper reviews curare etc and argues that US lethal injections, because of the use of paralytics and slow potassium poisons rather than quick effective standard veterinarian-style sodium pentothal injections, is manufactured anesthesia awareness:
No inmate has ever survived a botched lethal injection, so we do not know what it feels like to lie paralyzed on a gurney, unable even to blink an eye, consciously suffocating, while potassium burns through the veins on its way to the heart, until it finally causes cardiac arrest. But aided by the accounts of people who have suffered conscious paralysis on the operating table, one can begin to imagine.
“Anesthetizing the Public Conscience: Lethal Injection and Animal Euthanasia”, Alper 2008: Alper reviews curare etc and argues that US lethal injections, because of the use of paralytics and slow potassium poisons rather than quick effective standard veterinarian-style sodium pentothal injections, is manufactured anesthesia awareness: