New details of IV team’s attempts to find a vein shared by Pike’s lawyer ‘shocked and disturbed’ practitioners

New details of IV team’s attempts to find a vein shared by Pike’s lawyer ‘shocked and disturbed’ practitioners

Medical experts have expressed shock at the apparent incompetence shown by Tennessee’s execution team during the failed lethal injection of Christa Pike, the prisoner who survived a normally fatal dose of pentobarbital, which they say would be considered medical malpractice in any other setting.

New details emerged on Thursday of how Tennessee’s intravenous (IV) team struggled for almost an hour to set up a line into Pike’s arms through which she would be administered the fatal dose of sedative. A blow-by-blow account was released in legal proceedings from Pike’s lawyer, Randy Spivey, who was present inside the death chamber at her 30 September failed execution.

The technical procedures attempted by the four unidentified members of the IV team as they tried to find a vein, as described by Spivey, provoked alarm among medical experts. They said the standards applied appeared to fall glaringly short of anything that would be deemed acceptable in a medical environment.

  • Manjushri@piefed.socialEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    This is absolutely true, but i would challenge the assertion about making people throw away good meds being bad for business.

    The law passed in 1979 requiring manufacturers to provide an expiration date of when they could guarantee a drug was still safe and fully effective did not require that the manufacturers do any long term tests, to establish accurate dates though. Many companies slapped a one year date on the labels and called it a day.

    They could guarantee a year with then current testing protocols and if people had to toss their perfectly good meds and buy more, then that would just be good for company profits.

    The US military keeps huge stockpiles of medicines on hand. Faced with throwing away millions of dollars of meds every year they commissioned a study.

    With a large and expensive stockpile of drugs, the military faced tossing out and replacing its drugs every few years. What they found from the study is 90% of more than 100 drugs, both prescription and over-the-counter, were perfectly good to use even 15 years after the expiration date.

    Pharmaceutical companies were happy to tellpeople throw away medicines years before they needed to.