Slashdot Mirror
Pfizer Blocks The Use Of Its Drugs In Executions
HughPickens.com writes: Erik Eckholm reports in the NYT that the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has announced that it has imposed sweeping controls on the distribution of its products to ensure that none are used in lethal injections, a step that closes off the last remaining open-market source of drugs used in executions. "Pfizer makes its products to enhance and save the lives of the patients we serve," the company says, and "strongly objects to the use of its products as lethal injections for capital punishment." "With Pfizer's announcement, all F.D.A.-approved manufacturers of any potential execution drug have now blocked their sale for this purpose," says Maya Foa. "Executing states must now go underground if they want to get hold of medicines for use in lethal injection." The mounting difficulty in obtaining lethal drugs has already caused states to furtively scramble for supplies. Some states have used straw buyers or tried to import drugs from abroad that are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration, only to see them seized by federal agents. Other states have experimented with new drug combinations, sometimes with disastrous results, such as the prolonged execution of Joseph Wood in Arizona in 2014, using the sedative midazolam. A few states have adopted the electric chair, firing squad or gas chamber as an alternative if lethal drugs are not available. Since Utah chooses to have a death penalty, "we have to have a means of carrying it out," said State Representative Paul Ray as he argued last year for authorization of the firing squad.
Just switch to nitrogen asphyxiation if you want a humane execution which isn't dependent upon strapping the condemned down to a table, having to have a non-professional put an IV in, trouble getting drugs, etc...
The supplies can be had at any welding shop for not much money.
I don't read AC A human right
They'll just have a compounding pharmacy make a batch of the same drugs off the record, or they'll send someone with a big sack of cash to drive out of state and obtain it illegally. I respect Pfizer for taking this stance, but the thirst for blood will sadly not be stopped.
A simple gas mask and a tank of Nitrogen and you've got a guaranteed execution toolkit. There is no need for "exotic" chemicals.
Search wikipedia for Inert_gas_asphyxiation
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
I don't much care for drug companies, but I suspect it is a violation of the Hippocratic oath to kill your patient.
We need more executions to reduce overcrowding in prisons. There are some people whose crimes affect thousands or even millions of people. Authors of malware and hackers who carry out data breaches can harm millions of people with one crime. There's no good reason why we should pay to incarcerate these criminals or release them back to society to commit more crimes. The best solution is to execute them. We should be increasing the number of executions, not phasing them out.
get old sparky back and other inmates know when the lights dim that it went off.
I find these new adventures in controlling behaviour through fantastical intellectual property inventions deeply troublesome. Pfizer's moral concerns may indeed have merit, but in this case it seems to me that the end does not justify the means. If Pfizer wants to take a stand then they should should employ the means available to any other citizen. If Pfizer wants new law then they should argue for it with duly elected lawmakers, not presume to make the law themselves.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Put them in jail instead.
It's cheaper and a wrongful conviction can be reversed.
The majority of countries no longer have the death penalty.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
1: Millennials are now old enough to assume power of and chair their respective pharmaceutical boards, and they simply dont care for execution.
2: Pharmaceutical corporations realize the likelihood that with the rise of Millennials and ever encroaching data breaches, they could be implicated in human execution and would face nontrivial political and legal backlash in the coming years.
either way, well played.
Good people go to bed earlier.
What ever happened to good old inert gas asphyxiation?
It is an alternative execution method by law in Oklahoma.
Who is "we"?
How can a corporation have feelings?
Why is this utterly ridiculous kind of false expression accepted in society?
I get that people love to invent reasons to feel good and lap this shit up, but surely there are enough people of intelligence around that could point out that this is completely false and insidious in intent?
Corporations exist to nullify the interference of human emotion in business. That is their cardinal purpose. So be offended at falsehoods like this if you value your humanity.
"In keeping with our mission of serving our patients, Pfizer also announces an immediate reduction in pricing of all of our drugs......NOT!"
like its drugs don't kill dozens each and every day!
When the cost argument started to gain traction here in Florida, Rick Scott just tried to make it cheaper to kill people by speeding up the process. It's not about justice, it's about revenge.
Of course factories and sales in some of the worst human rights abuse countries in the world are okay. I guess doing business with evil regimes is okay as long as they don't use your products for things you don't approve of. Let's see them stop all sales in China as a protest over Chinese government abuses. Or Turkey. Or Singapore. Or Russia. Not going to happen. This is fake morality. They don't care about right and wrong. It is just convenient, safe, and politically correct to attack the death penalty in the Unites States.
http://www.fiercepharma.com/partnering/pfizer-building-plant-saudi-arabia
http://www.ibtimes.com/saudi-arabia-executions-2016-beheadings-may-set-new-record-year-amid-western-pressure-2347203
So when the prisons start using firing squads, they will be accused of infringing the eighth amendment ("which bars unusual or cruel punishment").
However the same bullets lawfully fired from the same weapon in any other situation would be ok.
Could it be possible that in the next century, accused killers will be killed in their natural sleep, when their REM sleep phase is at the deepest sleep phase? Killing will be done by the overdose of the laughing gas.
What the heck. Death penalty used to be cruel for a reason. As a deterrent to the other people, an entertainment and indelible memories of what happens for those who kill other people.
In the 1970's, the flower child generation spawned flower child researchers who used social "science" to arrive at flower child conclusions that they wanted. We are still feeling the effects of this bad research in many areas. This era was the plague that will not go away. Many of these are often discussed on these forums, I am looking at your gender wage discrepancy. There are many others.
If you stop and use the smell test a bit, tie to you own life. Threat of punishment is always in the calculus of a crime. If you steal that post it note, and the worst you get is a cold hard stare from an HR lady, you may do it. If it leads to your immediate termination, you leave that note the hell alone.
The death penalty will not deter a crime of passion. That is absolutely true. However, if you are thinking about murder, and you start imagining the needle is waiting for you.... Its a little different.
Anyways, people resist these old studies, and they often find different conclusions. Here is one on this:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
"Liberalism is a very noble idea, currently controlled by some very bad people. Be sure you do not get the two confused.
because an excessive amount of milk in your bloodstream does more harm than these chemicals.
And you can purchase it everywhere.
Not this case, there are many ways to kill people, none of them are humane...
Capital punishment is widely considered cruel and inhuman punishment in violation of the human rights convention.
The US and Japan is the last western countries to maintain this barbaric practice...
No, I think it's alright for companies to stand up against this issue.. Seriously, European countries have threaten local companies that they could face criminal charges if they exported drugs intended to murder people.
I'm not even sure that's so far fetched, when capital punishment is seen as a human rights violation, why shouldn't your company be held responsible for murder, if you export drugs for such purposes.
Maybe the board and management of Pfizer realised they are heading to being convicted of a crime that has the death penalty as punishment and are positioning themselves so that the tools to allow the punishment to proceed are not available.
Selling your drug to the citizens of a country that has leadership which performs horrible things or
Employing people in a country that has leadership which performs horrible things
vs
Selling your drug directly to an organisation which will do horrible things with your product.
The first part still isn't great, but there's still a world of difference.
It's turtles all the way down.
Pfizer's birth control polls are the largest cause of homosexuality, a prime source of suicides and AIDS deaths, so their products are a leading cause of homicides.
Instead of treating guns as "a human right" how about keep some perspective about what they actually are. They are very good tools for killing and are used to humanely kill animals worldwide.
So there you go - useful tool and not surrogate flag or ego booster.
I don't want to be the one patronizing all you "helpful experts" suggesting wonderful alternative methods to get rid of (execute) your inmates. History has taught us endless options to end the life of fellow humans, there is no shortage at all, lest the need for more.
But a large part of the rest of this planet frowns upon this fixation and desire to implement the death penalty. I wouldn't hurt to look in your mirror critically and realize in what good company you guys are (think Saudi Arabia, Iran north Korea etc)
Please, use you're knowledge and good judgement, your academic independent view, to suggest options for the US to join the rest of the civilised world and to abolish the death penalty.
What you guys really need is a more humane society, not a more efficient way to kill humans. You already excel in that subject.
Why are other peoples sig's always more witty ???
Questions we are not supposed to ask while we heap praise on them for their high-minded morals:
1. Do they supply the sorts of meds that people get hooked on and ruin their lives using? Why, yes, they do. Do they track where it all goes to make sure eveyone with a legitimate use can get it but it does not flood the streets? Apparently not. Many addicts of such drugs were not violent criminals out abusing innocent people, but rather became addicts after using pain meds in a medical situation before eventually going on to die of overdoses. There's a lot of money made every year, however, by drug companies selling far more narcotics than the legitimate market demands. It's not really in their interests to know where all the excess is going since they make money on every bottle they sell. How many otherwise-innocent people are dying every year from their more-lucrative drugs? Hint: more than were being legitimately executed after being convicted by juries of committing some of the most evil violent crimes.
2. Do they supply drugs for abortion? Why Yes, they do.
Like many "progressives" they are opposed to executing violent convicted murderers who've had their day in court and exhausted all their appeals, but have no problem at all supporting the murder of the only human beings we are all certain are absolutely innocent, unborn children. To oppose abortion AND the death penalty makes rational sense as a total pro-life position. To oppose abortion and support the death penalty makes sense as a pro-innocent-life position and even a position that says "all life is precious, and so much that no murderer can pay for the crime with anything less than his own life". To support abortion (killing the innocent) and oppose the death penalty (preserving the guilty) is a complete inversion of the very idea of morality.
Do you really think a mugger or whatever is thinking that far ahead?
Sure, it's going to stop the honest people who consider their actions and consequences but they already have plenty of things to stop them.
Criminals have a bad habit of not doing what they are told to do so your "sending a message" is unlikely to work. Maybe those "flower child researchers", some of who served in Korea and Vietnam, fit your definition of "a real man" more than any of the readers of this website and thus did not arrive at "flower child conclusions". Criminology isn't for the faint of heart after all.
I think I'll go with the subject matter experts on this one instead.
If it was global warming, astronomy, brain surgery or rocket science maybe - seems they are experts on everything according to some:)
Maybe I'm wrong and a Turkish economics degree is equivalent to a doctorate in criminology elsewhere, but I doubt it and I'd trust someone with the latter instead.
Where would an economist even start in researching something like this and who is going to pay them as they being themselves up to speed in a totally different field, and presumably spend the years required to get to the top of that different field?
If you stop and use the smell test a bit it stinks does it not?
Pfizer scrambling for the moral high ground. Providing drugs to kill people damages their image and there's almost no profit in it so their PR flacks craft a nobly worded sentiment for their blurb. I worked for them through PhRMA and believe me, I saw no indication of concern from them for anything without a fcking $ sign in front of it. Evil people.
"Consult a doctor if execution lasts more than 4 hours."
If a state was being "humane" it wouldn't execute people in the first place. And that being so it should just drop the pretense and shoot them. Shoot them in the heart and they'll rapidly lose consciousness and die. It's quick, it's effective, it's cheap. And it could be done in a way that doesn't require a human firing squad if that's a concern.
They can't commit another crime? Of course they can commit another crime. Prisoners have been known to murder other prisoners, to murder guards, and to escape (giving them the opportunity to commit any number of crimes on the outside). Smart escapees try to stay low, but there's a reason why the authorities get their panties all in a bunch whenever especially violent and psychotic inmates escape. Maybe an escapee who wants transportation decides to carjack a vehicle and to murder the driver to keep them from alerting the authorities.
There's also the issue of attempts to progressively weaken the laws. For example, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that you can't execute juvenile murderers; this was generally a good ruling, although it spares some murderers who really ought to face full adult penalties. E.g., there was a teenager in NH who was about a month shy of his 18th birthday. He led an invasion of a random home whose purpose was the murder of everyone inside. He and his buddies hacked a mother to death, and left her badly-injured daughter (who survived) for dead. Afterwards he joked with his buddies that he wanted to ask the mother "How does it feel to wake up to being hacked to death by a machete? How does it feel?" At first, the courts gave this scum life without parole, in accordance with New Hampshire state law. Then the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that legislatures cannot mandate life in prison without parole for the little darlings. Judges must have discretion as to the sentencing, so they have the option of going easy on the convicts. So this murderer got a new hearing; presumably the judge reimposed the life in prison without parole sentence, this time on the basis of judicial discretion.
Fortunately for the general public, the crime did not happen in Massachusetts. The Massachusetts state supreme court ruled that juveniles cannot be sentenced to life in prison without parole, no matter what they have done. Can you imagine the risk to the general public if a parole board let someone like this murderer, or the junior Washington D.C. sniper, back out on the streets?
I would let the cops use them for target practice. There are plenty of cops who have the experience of executing people already so no need to train them.
Or I would use the guillotine. It worked extremely well during the French Revolution.
Bottom line, there are many ways to execute someone but people want it to be nice. The pain and suffering is plain BS.
Much like in an old horror movie I suggest a huge water tank made of very heavy steel be elevated to a height of thirty feet, filled with a few tons of water, and with the prisoner well chained to a large anvil like bed, the tank simply be dropped turning the inmate into a very thin person, about as thin as a sheet of paper. The water in the tank can be used on the lawn, the tank lifted up again and filled and ready for the next inmate. Or one can take the cheap route and simply insert the barrel of a 12 guage shotgun into the inmates mouth and pull the trigger. A shotgun shell is probably less than one dollar, and I am quite certain that death will be both totally reliable and sudden. We can turn a complex and expensive ritual into a trivially easy mode of dispatch. And i'll bet no prisoner ever complains about the process.
It is a deterrent for the guy you execute. It will deter said person from ever killing again.
its eco-friendly makes for a good "Show" and can be made Quick.
just make sure the condemmed have big pockets to hold lead shot (amount TBA)
I laugh when I hear about drug companies taking the moral "high road" when it comes to these issues.
This is an industry that has repeatedly milked every last cent out of life saving drugs. An industry that puts profit before human life has no moral ground to stand on.
That said, this is an ineffective protest - states will not simply drop the death penalty when far cheaper and easier forms of execution exist. I suspect if these drugs can no longer be found the gas chamber and firing squad will be brought back. Bullets and hydrogen cyanide are pretty cheap and very effective.
In history executing a dangerous person was really the only option. Is a rural town supposed to have a prison guarded 24/7? The resources to do so aren't available. Take desert island with 12 people. If one murders another the death penalty is a moral action.
But in modern economies we have the capabilities to lock someone away for life for not much money. This is preferable because there is always a risk the person is actually innocent.
In reality the whole concept of the modern criminal justice system is flawed. The whole purpose should be to restore the victim as much as possible. Prisons should only be used to confine people to work off their debts to restore their victims. The problem with this is that it requires an actual victim which eliminates 90% of the crimes which are committed against the "state"
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
If bakers must provide wedding cakes to the perverts, why shouldn't a drug company be required to sell their drugs to the executioners?
Other states have experimented with new drug combinations, sometimes with disastrous results, such as the prolonged execution of Joseph Wood in Arizona in 2014, using the sedative midazolam.
If you experience an execution lasting longer than four hours, contact your warden immediately.
It's just a posture to make them appear ethical to increase their profits. This does not address the havoc (and yes, death) their drugs wreak on their everday customers. Sickening and pathetic.
CO
Morphine (chops to all the other psoters, u wun)
Heroin (redundant, I know)
A multitude of anesthetics.
Modern firing squad. Pros: Plenty of volunteers for the squad, trust me on this; no cost, the volunteers willingly undergo training and will provide their own approved ammo. Cons: Outrage from the many who will be offended by this; more outrage from the many who will be outraged by this; rampant misunderstanding of the process.
Sadly, none of these will be simple to implement:
- Testing. On animals. This will offend someone.
- Developing the actual process. This will also offend someone.
- Defending the practice of capital punishment.
Is this permissible, that a drug maker should refuse to provide products for legal use? Seems they provide them for off-label uses, which are merely unapproved, not necessarily illegal. But it's their business.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
It's actually about giving the rest of society an incentive to not engage in the same crimes for which someone else was found guilty.
No it isn't. The US has gone WAY beyond the level of penalties that have a beneficial effect in deterring crime. The US has the highest incarceration rate of any industrialized nation and yet it doesn't have lower crime rates. In fact the US has HIGHER rates of several types of violent crimes. No, the penalties that are handed out and conditions of the prisons has everything to do with politics and very little to do with crime prevention. Being "tough on crime" gets votes regardless of the effectiveness or morality of the actions that result.
Just like the police do not come until a crime is happening, or after the fact, a disincentive can not be given until someone is judged guilty by a jury of their peers.
Police routinely show up in places where a crime is reasonably likely to occur. Police being present in a location with no crime being committed mostly makes it less likely that a crime will occur. Happens all the time.
Handing out increasingly disproportional punishments for crimes does nothing to improve deterrence of crimes further.
The police are not there to save you from a crime, they are there to clean up after the fact.
Incorrect. They are there for both purposes. Police are both a deterrent and and enforcement mechanism.
I personally do not think the United States deserves the death penalty. The US Justice system is so perverse and unjust that such life and death decisions should not be entrusted to it. The outcome of criminal trials has only to do with the wealth and/or political connectedness of the accused, and nothing else.
Prosecutors, Sheriffs, and Judges are elected (or worse, appointed by politicians) and have to run for office (or appease their political masters), and that means killing a few black people to appear tough on crime to wealthy white voters who are scared of everything. That is not a justice system. That is a dictatorship.
Third world countries like the US need more incentive to join the rest of the civilized world. Perhaps we should kick them off the security council and impose sanctions. I don't see why the UN Security Council should be entertaining the ideals of an archaic third world society anyway.
Bakers don't want to sell a cake to gays for a wedding? Here comes BIG GOVERNMENT to force them to do it anyway... But a Drug Company can decide not to sell needed drugs and they get a pass?
This approach is only feasible for those who will never be released. If you brutalize someone, eschewing rehabilitation for the sake of retribution and then let them out, you not only have a non-rehabilitated criminal, you have one who is angry and resentful and very likely to re-offend and escalate upon release.
Because of this, your idea is a very bad one (although it certainly is one held by a lot of shallow thinkers, along with a bunch of other ideas with overall negative social impact.)
The winners in your system are law enforcement and the penal system, both of which pick up direct financial windfalls proportional to crime rate; politicians also dip into the well for "tough on crime" rhetoric, which boosts their electability, and benefit via the lobbyists for the law enforcement and incarceration industries. The losers... that would be everyone else. Including the armchair droolers who think sitting around and shaking their fists in support of retribution makes creating harder and more resentful criminals a "win.
For the rare death-penalty and life-without-parole situations, maltreatment may serve as a deterrent (although there's no real evidence of that. We certainly experience a continuous stream of new criminality at that level, and always has, so it sure doesn't look like it, anyway.) But at least it doesn't produce a (further) hardened criminal that the rest of us have to deal with.
All of this, of course, is quite aside from the fact that life sentence w/o parole and the death penalty are already very high on any horrific penalty scale. Particularly when you add in prison conditions in general (speaking of the USA.)
--fyngyrz
anon due to mod points
Rather than deal with the implications of the death penalty (moral and otherwise), revoke their citizenship and banish them to an island. It seems that they would either learn to work hard to survive, or they would die trying. Australia comes to mind as a success story in this method.
That logic fails to allow for the presumption by the criminal that they will not be caught; and if caught, they may not be convicted; and if convicted, they may not receive the death penalty.
The very existence of, and huge participation in, lotteries should tell you without any doubt at all that people constantly do things with almost no chance at an outcome in their favor, because they are convinced that there is, in fact, a worthy chance at an outcome in their favor.
TL;DR: People suck at figuring out risk, benefit, and reward. Also: If that doesn't apply to you, that still doesn't mean it doesn't apply almost everyone else.
--fyngyrz
anon due to mod points
To oppose the death penalty is to say that a few years of a murder's life spent in a cell with access to TV and movies and books and with air conditioning and medical and dental care is equal in value to the entire life of one or more innocent human beings. The only way you can say that a decade in jail "pays the debt" for the murder of a child is to say that the 60? years violently taken from that child is equal in value to crimping the lifestyle of the murderer and that the violence and horror of the actual murder is equal to or less significant than the stress of the courtroom the murderer endured.
I prefer to live in a civilized country where the life of an innocent is still considered more valuable than the life of a scumbag who preys on the innocent.
It's funny, pharmas were just busted for promoting off-label use. Why isn't this considered just another off-label use?
Pfizer piles up a little moral dirt and then stands on it so they can brag about their moral high ground.
Smoking kills a lot of people. http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/dat... one out of five deaths that link says.
Pfizer makes things like chantix, nicitrol inhalers, gums, and patches that do not prove very effective in stopping smoking. They are very profitable due to cost and customers coming back again and again. Pfizer also hates vapes because vapes just work.
You look at the FUD aimed at the most effective smoking cessation tool ever and you ask "why?".
Big Tobacco, Big Pharma (Pfizer front and center) and politicians (love the tax dollars and tobacco funds) hate something that actually allows people to quit smoking.
So while there are decades of research on the vape "smoke" compounds, due to their use the theater and stage, now we get scare stories and bans. (If you were wondering the research says the vape "smoke" is an irritant for asthmatics and there are a grand total of 0 cancer deaths linked to it)
When you call the American Cancer Society and say "I have tried everything to quit smoking and only vapes work, I should keep vaping right?" and they say "You should go back to smoking if that is the case." (I actually had this talk with them and I was completely stunned), try searching their site for "Pfizer" and see when the latest "donation" was.
So Pfizer is working their hardest to ensure 500,000 smoking deaths in the US every year and 10 million world wide.. I don't want to Godwin this but that is LITERALLY (correct usage) worse than Hitler.
So after that, they want to take the moral high ground about not helping with a handful of executions each year in the US?.. I do not know whether to laugh or to cry.
Simple and effective, reusable and quite painless if the condemned is first sedated on a gurney with common surgical anesthesia. Do not allow witnesses to view the beheading. Simply allow them to see the body from the shoulders down. Allow him to say his final words, knock him out with the drugs, then wheel him into the device face up so that his head goes through the opening. Begin the countdown and then have a doctor pronounce him dead once everyone sees his body shudder as the blade drops. Public spectacles were a mistake with the original guillotine and undermine it's simplicity and effectiveness.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Firing squads are inhuman and it should be required that a single person walks up to them and shoots them in the head. If no one wants to do that, then I guess they live to see another day. If someone wants to do it, they should have to get a psych eval first.
As alternatives go, I'm shocked (heh) that any state would use the electric chair in this day and age. That has got to be one of the more painful, drawn out, gruesome ways to kill someone. Firing squad or drop hanging would be a lot more humane.
If they're going to execute regardless, for the most instant, painless, but messy execution, just put their head in a high power, high speed hydraulic press that slams down with several tons of force. They'd never even know what hit them. I'd hate to be the janitor though.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
If think that the judge that issues the death sentence should perform the execution himself.
I want it to be by having a vacuum hose shoved in my asshole to suck out all of my vital organs. That seems like the most dignified way to go.
I mean can a company that makes hammers somehow control who those hammers are sold to, and what they are used for?
At any rate hammers kill more people than guns in the USA, so I think it is about time we started regulating hammers. The Bureau of Hammers, Alcohol, Tobacco, and firearms could run background checks on everyone purchasing a hammer. Of coarse nobody from the Bureau of Prisons would be allowed to own a hammer, because it theoretically could be used to impose a death sentence on someone that the state wants to kill, and the HATF wants to protect people who would otherwise be killed by hammers.
Wouldn't it be cool if the HATF did a raid on a hammer manufacture, and the evil hammer lord was sentenced to death at the Bureau of Prisons. Unfortunately there were no hammers at the bureau of prisons, because they had all been confiscated by the HATF. The correctional institution could not of coarse shoot the inmate, nor electrocute, nor asphyxiate, nor poison with life saving Phizer drugs, because those methods are are cruel.
This makes as much sense as anything else in the article. To me it is ridiculous that the state can not find a legal way to kill someone. I mean the state makes all the laws, and determines what is legal,and what is cruel and unusual. Just have Prez Obama hammer away an executive order requiring all death row inmates be humanely hit over the cranium with the 'hammers of love' until they become rehabilitated or dead. Re-pubs will love it because it kills people. Dems will love it because they love it every-time Prez Obama legislates reality in some bizarre and heretofore unheard of way through executive orders.
Incorrect. I kept going on and on about the topic and you kept going on and on about the email triviality with some odd stuff about governors not having anything to keep secret.
Are you mixing me up with a different person or being dishonest?
Either way, it's a little odd that you are consuming more time claiming that you provided that information than the time it would take you for a quick cut and paste. Not a good look.
One more thing I thought of that should have been in other posts - by 1970 the death penalty had been suspended in the USA and it was only reinstated in 1977 due to a serial killer in Washington DC causing a change in opinion.
Think about who you are calling "the flower child generation" - Richard Nixon and a bunch of criminologists who had built up their reputation before the flower children even turned up. Outside of political nepotism it takes years before a person is considered an expert good enough to listen to when setting policy - even more so in the conservative corridoors of power in 1970.
Despite claims that RoundUp is totally safe to drink (by a Monsanto lobbyist who was then offered a glass, and refused), they could let the person drink a bottle of Monsanto's RoundUp. It does not only clean up pavement, but society too.