“He said Socrates to his executioner: Friend, you who have experience of these things, will you tell me what to do.
To which the man replied: You do not have to do more than walk, move your legs; then you lie on the bed and the poison will work.
So saying, he handed the cup to Socrates; he took it without hesitation and drank the poison“.
This is the fragment of the work ‘Phaedo’, in which Plato recounts the execution of his teacher by ingestion of the poison of the State, after having been condemned for impiety and for corrupting the young.
The active principle of this concoction was the hemlock, ‘Conium Maculatum’, which contains the alkaloid coniine or cicutin, a neurotoxin that alters the functioning of the central nervous system, causes paralysis and produces death by suffocation, because the diaphragm stops working. The lethal dose of the pure alkaloid is 0.2 grams. The effect it produces is similar to that of plants used by the Amazon Indians to make cure, substance studied for the first time by the Sevillian doctor Nicolas Esteban Monardes (1493-1588). But this substance not only causes death, their study served as the basis for the pharmaceutical companies Squibb and Welcome to develop, in the middle of the 20th century, muscle relaxants, the basis of modern anesthesia that have hardly any side effects and save us infinite suffering in operations.
Although twenty-five centuries have passed since the execution of Socrates, today there are still many countries in which the death penalty is in force, and in most of them the form of execution is the lethal injection, which is the fastest process and, in theory, causes less suffering to the inmate. It consists of three ingredients that are introduced into the veins, one after the other, to prevent them from reacting with each other. Death, detected by an electrocardiogram, comes in about seven minutes. The first ingredient supplied is sodium pentothal or pentobarbital, an extraordinarily fast-acting barbiturate that renders the condemned unconscious in about ten seconds. Therapeutic doses when used as an anesthetic range from 0.03 to 0.5 grams; the dose used in the lethal injection is ten times greater, five grams. The second ingredient is pancuronium bromide, whose effect is similar to that of hemlock and curare, since it paralyzes striated muscles, such as the diaphragm, causing death by suffocation. The dose used, 0.1 grams, induces muscle paralysis in about fifteen to twenty seconds. The last ingredient is potassium chloride, KCl, one of the most abundant salts in the human body whose deficiency can cause severe damage, so it is prescribed medically. However, administering a few milliliters intravenously, it produces a fulminant cardiac arrest. It was the most used form of execution in Iran in the 1990s, the cruelest time in the Islamic Republic.
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On December 10, the World Human Rights Day and the first and most important of those rights is the right to life. In 2015, 1,634 people were legally and officially executed, with the exception of those executed in China, thousands of people whose number is not known, and other data on the executions. Since 2015, according to the Amnesty International (AI) report of the year 2020, the number of executions has not stopped decreasing, as well as that of the countries where it is still in force. However, despite the challenges posed by covid-19, in 2020 there were eighteen countries where executions were carried out. This year at least 483 people suffered the death penalty, 88% of all known executions, in only four countries – Iran, Egypt, Iraq and Saudi Arabia -; As in previous years, these figures do not include the thousands of executions that took place in China.
Socrates’ death was a state murder; the deaths of many of those convicted in countries like China or Iran, which are not very respectful of human rights, are also so. We cannot stop criminals from taking lives, but we have to keep fighting so that the death penalty has no place in any legal system. Life is the highest good of the human being and no other human being can claim the right to tear it away.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com