http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110126/ap_on_re_us/us_execution_drug_shortagePentobarbital is a barbiturate used to induce comas during surgeries to prevent brain damage when blood flow is interrupted, and to reduce possible brain damage following strokes or head trauma. It is chemically related to the same product used to euthanize pets.
Medical experts say Ohio and Oklahoma's dosages are so big they're lethal by themselves.
The amount that Oklahoma uses and Ohio has proposed — 5 grams — is 50 times the normal dosage used in hospitals, said Howard Nearman, chairman of the Anesthesiology Department at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland.
Not only would a dosage that size stop someone's breathing, it would also likely cause a drastic drop in blood pressure, all of which would easily lead to a person's death, Nearman said Wednesday.
Experts who testified in a federal lawsuit trying to stop Oklahoma's proposed switch to pentobarbital were split on the drug's effectiveness in putting humans to death.
The size of Oklahoma's dosage "by itself would cause death in almost everyone," Mark Dershwitz, a University of Massachusetts anesthesiologist, said in a report submitted to a federal judge in an Oklahoma hearing last year.
"It's a massive overdose," Dershwitz said Wednesday in a phone interview.
A second expert testifying in Oklahoma said the lack of clinical evidence for using pentobarbital as an anesthetic raises questions about its effectiveness in capital punishment.
"The use of pentobarbital as an agent to induce anesthesia has no clinical history and is non-standard," Harvard medical professor David Waisel told the court.
