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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   30012 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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Apparently most of them these days are lethal injection rather than the bullet to the head, but as I said I think the organs from the former would still be usable anyway.

Googling this, one of the first results was an NPR article, which is mostly about the damage that lethal injections inflicts on the lungs (it certainly sounds like lungs wouldn't be viable for transplant after a lethal injection, and China carries out 250 such transplants a year), but also mentions the effect on the heart in passing:

Lubarsky warns that if the first drug isn't anesthetizing the inmate, then they're likely to feel not only the suffocating sensation of pulmonary edema, but also the pain of the third drug: potassium chloride.

"It's like a burning cocktail coursing through your veins," says Lubarsky, referring to potassium chloride. "Once it reaches the heart, it stops the heart, and you do die. But in the process there is a period of just intense and searing pain."

WRT lungs: huh, TIL.

WRT heart: my understanding is that KCl does exactly that: stop the heart. There's a difference between cardiac arrest (the heart is not beating) and cardiac necrosis (the heart muscle cells are dying); AFAIK KCl does the former but not the latter. Obviously, both of these do tend to cause the other over time, but my guess is that if you took the heart out reasonably fast it wouldn't actually die.

Gotcha, thanks.

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