America has for years been struggling with a shortage of the drugs it uses to execute people, yet it was only in August, in Nebraska, that the first judicial killing using opioids was performed. Aside from moral questions about the death penalty itself, the resistance for so long to this obvious solution denotes a particularly sadistic puritanism, as though it’s an unacceptable risk that even the last moments of a condemned man should be at all pleasant.
Steven Poole
The power of the poppy
Nothing beats opium for pain relief. But Lucy Inglis prefers to focus on the drug’s undoubted dangers

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