KCl: Deadly and Beneficial, It Just Depends on the Amount
Bad Drugs: Lethal Injection Does Not Work as Designed
Lethal injection was invented in 1977 by Oklahoma state medical examiner Jay Chapman, who, based on his own experiences under anesthesia, concocted the drug cocktail from an ultrashort-acting barbiturate and a chemical paralytic. He added a heart-stopping drug to the mix to provide a painless, quick death with built-in redundancy. If one drug didn't kill the death row inmate, one of the other two would. But dosage is critical to the efficacy of lethal injection according to a new study, which found that if any of the doses are off the recipient not only feels pain, but he or she also must suffer a slow death by the asphyxiation following total paralysis.
Molecular biologist Teresa Zimmers of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and colleagues, including a surgeon, an anesthesiologist and a lawyer, analyzed the sparse public records of executions. Only two states provide such records: North Carolina and California, the latter of which was forced to do so by court order. In each of these states, varying dosages of sodium thiopental (a barbiturate to induce anesthesia), pancuronium bromide (a muscle relaxant that paralyzes all the muscles of the body) and potassium chloride (a salt that speeds the heart until it stops) are injected in doses designed to kill condemned inmates. Though the dosages vary by state, they do not vary by inmate—each is given the same amount of the drug whether short or tall, fat or thin.
As a result, death by lethal injection is not necessarily quick or painless, according to the study published in PLoS Medicine. In North Carolina inmates took an average of nine minutes to die (and much longer before flawed drug protocols were changed), and in California cessation of the heartbeat took from two to eight minutes after the last injection of the heart-stopping potassium chloride. "When potassium chloride was added, it didn't seem to change the time of death," Zimmers notes. "This suggests that potassium chloride may not be the agent of death."
Potassium chloride (KCl) is the salt of potassium after it's reacted with hydrochloric acid. It's an essential mineral in small doses, ingested like eating bananas. It's essential to muscle tone and action. That's why people who become dehydrated from working in the sun too long have severe muscle cramps, because their electrolyte balance is thrown off by potassium loss. It's the first to go when one sweats profusely.
In large doses, injected intravenously, it would burn and hurt horribly, because it's a salt and because it instantly throws off the chemical balance of the blood with which it comes into contact. It makes all muscles lock up in extreme contraction that would hurt unbearably. It wouldn't get to all muscles when a prisoner is being killed with it, however. Since the heart is a muscle and it pumps the blood -- the minute that massive dose of potassium salt hits the heart, one would be history and that would be as far as it would travel.
In addition, researchers found that the amounts of thiopental used may not be sufficient to render the procedure painless, based on comparisons with veterinary data. In the veterinary realm, government and professional oversight has led to the development of strict dosage guidelines for the appropriate painless killing of animals. The dosages used in human executions are, in some cases, lower by body weight than the dosages that would kill only 50 percent of mice and from which monkeys have been able to successfully recover. "The way that thiopental is administered, it would be an unacceptably low dose if the inmate was a pig scheduled for euthanasia," Zimmers says.
And, although the dosages of potassium chloride would be considered adequate to kill animals, they do not appear to have the intended effect in humans, failing to hasten the time of death. "We are doing it successfully in animals and we're doing it successfully because they've taken a hard look at it," notes Jon Sheldon, a study co-author and criminal defense attorney in Virginia. "When you do it with animals, there is no pain. It's likely there is with people."
That pain takes the form of slow asphyxiation due to an inability to use the diaphragm muscle to breathe as a result of the pancuronium bromide. "In such case death by suffocation would occur in a paralyzed inmate fully aware of the progressive suffocation and potassium-induced sensation of burning," the researchers write.
The scientists analyzed only 41 of the 891 lethal injections that have taken place in the U.S. to date (and considerably more worldwide). But many of the remaining states' drug protocols and details of their executions remain secret. Nevertheless, researchers say the small sample indicates that the cocktail is not working as intended. "This idea that this is a painless procedure is completely wrong," Zimmers says. "It's just invisible because the person is paralyzed."
"The legal standard is you can't have unnecessary or gratuitous pain," under the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, Sheldon adds. "It seems quite likely that a number of people are suffering pain. If a change to the protocol would be fairly simple to do, then the pain you are inflicting is clearly unnecessary."
Water Softening and KCl – A More Environmentally Sound Approach
Hard water is water that has high mineral content (in contrast with soft water). Hard water has high concentrations of Ca2+ and Mg2+ ions. Hard water is generally not harmful to one's health but can pose serious problems in industrial settings, where water hardness is monitored to avoid costly breakdowns in boilers, cooling towers, and other equipment that handles water. In domestic settings, the hardness of water is often indicated by the non-formation of suds when soap is agitated in the water sample.
Hardness in water is defined as concentration of multivalent cations Multivalent cations are cations (positively charged metal complexes) with a charge greater than 1+. They mainly have the charge of 2+. These cations include Ca2+ and Mg2+. These ions enter a water supply by leaching from minerals within an aquifier. Common calcium-containing minerals are calcite and gympsum. A common magnesium mineral is dolomite (which also contains calcium). Rainwater and distilled water are soft, because they also contain few ions.
The following equilibrium reaction describes the dissolving/formation of calcium carbonate scales:
CaCO3 + CO2 + H2O Ca2+ + 2HCO3-
Calcium and magnesium ions can sometimes be removed by water softeners
Since 1998, over 25 billion gallons of recycled water have been produced for irrigation in Monterey County alone. That’s 25 billion gallons of water that have not been pumped out of aquifers!
However, salt, especially from sodium chloride water softeners, is threatening this resource because it damages plants by restricting their root absorption.
Why Use Potassium Chloride Softener Salt?
Water softeners are a major source of sodium in recycled water. Switching to potassium will improve the quality of recycled water so it can be used for all types of irrigation including golf courses, green belts, and athletic fields. Every gallon of recycled water used is one gallon not pumped from our precious drinking water supplies. That's good for our community and the threatened Steelhead trout.
How Does a Water Softener Work?
Water softeners take the hardness (magnesium and calcium ions) out of your tap water. Small resin beads in the softener column are coated with sodium. As tap water flows over the resin beads, magnesium and calcium attach to the beads, releasing the sodium into the softened water.
.
Final Question to be answered Group:
1. Why do you think that KCl can be used as an effective water softener and also as a drug to kill someone? What is the difference between the two solutions?
HANDOUTS