If governments are always looking for more humane methods of execution, why are heroin and other opiates never used, since they are supposedly the most blissful way to pass?
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Governments aren’t looking for new methods of execution.
Most governments around the world have completely abolished the death penalty and of the rest most have restricted it crimes auch as high treason during war time and do not employ it for ordinary crimes such as murder.
The countries that continue to actually practice capital punishment are for the most part developing countries and dictatorships where human rights are not a top priority and where the fact that someone sentenced to death experiences great amounts of pain as they die is a feature rather than problem.
A third world hell hole where the new leader slowly tortures his predecessor to death in front of cameras to make a point is not going to waste much thought on how this could theoretically be made less painful.
The only countries that arguably count as developed and democratic and continue to use capital punishment are places like Taiwan, Japan, the Unites States of America and perhaps Singapore. The rest are dictatorships or places under sharia law or otherwise corrupt hellholes.
Even in places like the US capital punishment is only a thing in some parts of the country.
It is also a problem that educated people who know how the human body works, for the most part don’t want anything to do with executions.
Many doctors who value their oath would know how to make executions less painful but object to the process on principle. this is why for example the lethal injection method used in some states in the US was not designed by a practicing doctor but by a medical examiner, who mostly deals with dead bodies. This process is not working well.
Similarly pharma businesses that normally don’t have much of a conscience nevertheless refuse to get involved. mostly because they don’t want their drugs to be known as being used in lethal injections, it might scare customers off.
The electric chair was actually invented for exactly that reason to scare people of one type of electricity by the company that dealt with the other kind.
Foreign countries also don’t want to export anything that might be used in executions.
This limits anyone who wants to create less painful executions by a lack of experts and material.
On the other hand the people who want executions mostly don’t consider the pain and torture as a bad thing and are not interested in making it less painful.
The problem itself is a solved problem. we know how to put down pets without causing them unnecessary pain and in places where euthanasia is legal or at least tolerated, doctors who practice on humans also know how to help them pass on peacefully.
This is not an area where anyone actually needs to find a better solution.
It is just that the people who want to execute people don’t want to make things less painful and the people who know how to make things less painful are uninterested in helping the government kill people.
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