I really don't think you can compare surgery anesthesia to the death penalty the way you're doing.
With surgery, there's both an upper and lower limit when you're talking about dose. Too little and you aren't fully unconscious. Too much and you might die. Obviously this will always air on the side of you waking up than dying.
The death penalty is totally different, death is the end goal. There isn't really a "too much". And while different people do metabolize drugs differently. There's pretty much nobody on earth that won't be rendered unconscious and quickly dead from a massive barbiturate and potassium overdose.
And as for those claims you made. Apart from the fact that as you said, they might be misremembered, even if they aren't, once again there's a strong incentive for both the condemned, their supporters, and anti death penalty advocates to lie about it.
It is true however that there have likely been instances of botched lethal injection procedures that resulted in pain, with or without death as an end result. But this is likely a result of poor procedures stemming from the political dishonesty going on to start with. As ive been saying. The sole aim has been that it appear painless to witnesses. Which means we haven't always been making decisions based on what would result in the most painless death.
Then you have the European companies who decide or have been made to decide not to supply the best drugs to use for lethal injection, resulting in mistakes as new protocols are developed, which is then used to further justify having refused to provide them.
I have two primary points here. One being that we absolutely could kill people painlessly and reliably with lethal injection so long as we were smart about it and stopped trying to placate dishonest politics.
And two, that the politics surrounding it IS indeed dishonest. In the case of your post, as best I can tell, you're suggesting we can't reliably kill people painlessly with drugs. And I see no evidence of that and plenty of reason to think it's bullshit.
Nobody pumped full of barbiturates painkillers and potassium is gonna have an "unusual reaction" where they experience a slow drawn out death. It's total bullshit.
I didn't mean to suggest that we couldn't reliably kill people painlessly with drugs; however, the form of lethal injection we practice universally in this country is the midazolam+paralytic+potassium chloride method. I'm not concerned with hypothetical lethal injection methods that could be used -- I'm concerned with Lethal Injection as it is practiced in the US.
I believe the dosage of midazolam given is not that much greater, or even greater at all, as the dosage used in anaesthesia, as its purpose is not to kill the patient, but rather to render them unconscious for the portion that does. Benzodiazepines are extremely difficult to OD on when taken alone, so if the midazolam is in any way intended to kill the patient, then they are doing it wrong.
The relevance of the wisdom tooth surgery therefore being that at least one person in this thread is able to claim an atypical response to what was most likely the midazolam. I know for a fact I process Demerol normally, if you catch my drift, while the Propofol was probably what kept me asleep for the first 15-30 minutes of the operation. Point being, if the dosages are similar, and I end up on death row, I will most likely be awake for my own execution.
While my case was extreme, plenty of people do wakeup the one time during this kind of dental surgery, where midazolam+Demerol is a pretty standard combination. It could just be that going purely by mg/kg is not an extremely effective means of predicting how midazolam will effect an individual with any certainty. This is fine in dental surgery, where additional midazolam can be given if the initial dose wasn't enough, but is unacceptable for a process such as lethal injection.
But yeah, our supposedly "humane" lethal injection method doesn't even come close to resembling the method a euthanasist would choose. There absolutely has to be a method of killing people using drugs that is painless; there are too many good drugs out there for that not to be the case.
The idea of swapping fentanyl in for midazolam, by the way, is fucking barbaric. Are any of the people who come up with this shit even remotely educated in a science such as psychiatry or pharmacology? While I am a former opioid addict, I have never myself experienced an OD, but from what I understand, it isn't just a straight lapse into unconsciousness, correct? I mean, even if unconsciousness does eventually occur, I have heard it described as more of a slow lapse from consciousness to semi-consciousness, and eventually into full unconsciousness if it progresses far enough, but only after a long period of time. Somebody with more experience can correct me if I am wrong.
I know for a fact that an opioid is not a suitable replacement for a benzo, however. I also know that opioids make for a terrible euthanasia agent, both because it is difficult to find a dosage that will reliably kill someone, and because death by opioid os apparently not as pleasant as it might seem to somebody who has been in a nod before.
The fact that a state not only considered, but approved this, and that it was only blocked because the pharmaceutical company who supplied the fentanyl did not want the good name of their product tarnished by its having killed someone is just further evidence that we live in a world gone completely mad.