Canada already has MAiD – medical assistance in dying, and as far as I know this assistance does not cause pain. Why is it so difficult for the US to use similar methods?
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Because no pharmaceutical company wants to be known as the one whose products are used for lethal injections, and changing the drugs or protocol used is usually a very long drawn-out and expensive legal process that will be challenged by the attorneys representing the person sentenced to death.
The hippocratic oath has a lot to do with this. Doctors swear to live by a set of ethical standards, which includes never harming a patient. So asking doctors to come up with, and administer, lethal injections is about as bad a thing that they could do to contravene their own rules.
Because pharmaceutical companies don’t want to sell to executioners. Some pharma companies are situated in places where it is illegal to sell drugs if they are intended to be used for the death penalty. Other pharma companies consider it so controversial that they don’t want to damage their reputation by being involved.
We know how to put people to sleep gently, but the people who do that and the tools they use are largely unavailable to executioners and the people who perform executions are not to worried about causing unnecessary pain and suffering to the people they are killing.
Many drugs that can be used to put pets to sleep and assist with suicide aren’t available for executions because generally drug makers don’t want their drugs associated with killing people against their will on purpose.
That is bad PR.
Many drug makers are international and subject to jurisdictions where making money like this would be a potential issue for them, thanks to courts, shareholders and business partners.
Several US states have made secrecy laws to hide where they are getting their drugs from and some US state had to allegedly illegally smuggle some drugs into the country.
In addition to that many medical professionals see it as going against their oath to be actively involved in executions.
Some of the execution methods in the US were developed by amateurs, who only have a very superficial knowledge about how human bodies work.
This leads to executions that are at times extremely drawn out and painful.
Mostly because the people who know how to do it right don’t want to be involved and the people who are involved don’t really care about making it unnecessarily painful.
Because being painless is not what they want.
You can kill painlessly with a face mask and a bottle of nitrogen. No needles, no drugs, no problem.
But that’s not the goal.
Part of the reason is that the EU banned the export of drugs used for executions in 2011. Many larger medicinal and chemical companies are from the EU, and they’d rather not move their headquarters and/or factories in order to sell a few hundred dollars worth of drugs.
There is a big difference between helping someone end their life by their own choice and *taking* someone’s life as an instrument of the government.
The most fundamental difference being that in the first case it’s that person’s choice – they have agency over ending their life – while in the latter case an imperfect justice system which has convicted and even executed innocent people has decided to end a person’s life, generally against that person’s will.
Pharmaceutical companies do not want to provide their medications for the latter purpose. You kill one innocent person and you’re Murder Incorporated.
Ethical physicians do not want to participate in executions (something something “first do no harm” – killing a healthy person who doesn’t want to die is viewed by most people as “harm.”) so the personnel, medications, and many of the techniques available to people seeking assisted suicide / medical aid in dying are generally *not* available for executions.
I feel like we might wanna switch to bullet injections. Maybe a device like that thing for cows in No Country for Old Men.
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