The Free Market of Death

I have been avoiding this story for a few weeks now as people around the office can tell you. I don't have a fixation with capital punishment, but have been very open on-air and with listeners I've met when the conversation has gone that way.

I don't like it, feel it's an overreach, and life in solitary confinement would be a far worse punishment than death for anyone who has committed a crime that would warrant death as punishment.

Let's agree there are some crimes committed that a criminal will never be 'rehabilitated' from.

But something interesting happened a few weeks ago, Utah reinstated the firing squad as the state's chosen method of capital punishment. Honestly, firing squad. In no small part because the pharmaceutical companies that make the lethal injection drugs used by states to, well, kill their inmates are refusing to sell to the states any more. That's right, no more lethal injection drugs. As a pharmaceutical company they make drugs to help, heal and assist in recovery of an ailment, not to take life.

That's all fine and good. It's been said by doctors, nurses and anesthesiologist in the past. But the earth shifted just a bit yesterday with the release of the following statement:

'The American Pharmacists Association discourages pharmacist participation in executions on the basis that such activities are fundamentally contrary to the role of pharmacists as providers of health care.

That's rather groundbreaking as pharmacists are the final option for the state to have them custom make the needed lethal injection drugs.

When everybody in the capital punishment game finally says, in short, "No more," where does that leave us? Do we press on with an antiquated form of 'punishment,' or do we realize we're buying an idea NOBODY is selling.