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COLUMBUS, Ohio – The single drug Ohio is preparing to use for its new execution method has a storied history in psychiatry, criminal interrogation and war.
Barring a successful legal challenge, sodium pentothal will be used Tuesday on Kenneth Biros, who would become the first person in the United States put to death with a single drug.
Biros, 51, argues that it is cruel and unusual for the state to subject him to a type of human experimentation, which his lawyers say is untried in the United States "or any other civilized country."
Ohio opted to go with a one-drug lethal injection after the attempted execution of another inmate, Romell Broom, failed Sept. 15. Gov. Ted Strickland stopped it when executioners failed to find a usable vein to deliver the traditional three-drug cocktail.
For Biros, the state plans to deliver an overdose of sodium pentothal, administered like a flu shot into the muscle, to put him to death. Biros was sentenced to die for killing and dismembering a woman he met in a bar in 1991.
Certainly, the effects of sodium pentothal are no mystery to science. It is a barbiturate widely used as a surgical anesthetic, a medical coma inducer and even an occasional recreational drug for risk-seeking teenagers.
The deadly character of its ultrafast action is no secret. The drug is used to euthanize pets and, infrequently, to carry out legalized assisted suicides in Europe.
Oregon’s assisted suicide law requires patients to administer the lethal drugs themselves and to take them by mouth, said Katrina Hedberg, Oregon’s state epidemiologist. She said secobarbital sodium and pentabarbital are the two most commonly used drugs, according to data kept by the state. Both are common sedatives that doctors prescribe in high doses.
Sodium pentothal has been a favorite subject of experimentation. In small doses, it has the qualities of a truth serum, relaxing a person’s resolve enough to elicit personal insights in therapy and criminal confessions under interrogation.
"Like all sedative drugs, if you give a very small amount of it, then the person would just get a little bit woozy," physician Mark Heath said during legal depositions in the Ohio case.
"If you give a medium dose of it, … the person will fall asleep but will wake back up very quickly," he said. "If you give a very large dose, such as the doses that are being used in executions, the person will be unconscious for … a period of hours."
Heath said the person dies because the drug removes the drive to breathe and the person suffocates.
In the 1950s, Dutch therapist Jan Bastiaans used thiopental sodium as an element of his controversial psychedelic psychiatry treatment, according to the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychiatric Studies.
If the drug didn’t work to sufficiently open up patients’ minds, Bastiaans moved on to LSD, psilocybin and other hallucinogens.
Human rights group Amnesty International is fighting an increased use in recent years of sodium pentothal and other "truth drugs" by interrogators around the world. Both international codes and medical ethics prohibit forcing confessions through the use of drugs, the group says.
One of sodium pentothal’s earliest debuts on the medical stage, during the Pearl Harbor attacks of World War II, also had a trial-and-error quality.
Legend had it that misuse of the drug in the hands of trainee anesthetists "was the cause of more fatal casualties among the servicemen of Pearl Harbor than were the enemy bombs," wrote F.E. Bennetts in the British Journal of Anesthesia.
Medical personnel treating soldiers who had gone into shock from their wounds were allegedly unpracticed in the use of the drug – then just seven years old – and were overdosing soldiers wounded in the battle while trying to save them.
But Bennetts’ review of public records made available decades later concluded that "the horror story" had been exaggerated. He estimated the number of deaths that might have been caused by anesthesia overdoses at four or five.
