Word: sodium
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...about half an hour, only the solution, consisting of sterile salt water used routinely as a medium for drug injections, flowed into Brooks. At about 12:10 a.m., the executioner injected the first of three syringes into the left tube. The dose: two grams of the barbiturate sodium thiopental, about five times the amount given as an anesthetic before surgery...
Brooks died from an overdose of the sodium thiopental, an autopsy revealed, just as prison authorities had intended. But two more syringes were injected as a guarantee of death. The second dose was 100 mg of pancuronium bromide, a synthetic muscle relaxant designed to paralyze Brooks and stop his breathing. The last was enough potassium chloride to stop the heart. When, at 12:16, Brooks was pronounced dead, two-thirds of the potassium chloride remained unused...
...matters of the heart fill the news these weeks, both firsts and quickly related. In Utah, Dr. Barney Clark was fitted for an artificial heart, and in Texas, the heart of Charles Brooks Jr. was stopped by doses of sodium thiopental, pavulon and potassium chloride administered by the department of corrections. One can muse on the irony of medical inventiveness being used for two antipodal purposes, but irony is not the mood with which the public is left. For Clark one feels apprehension, appreciation and a passing sense of social advancement. For Brooks one feels a vast emptiness and impotence...
...copycats seem to be turning to food products too. In Minneapolis, 14-year-old Marlon Barrow fell ill after drinking chocolate milk from a carton that proved, on analysis, to contain traces of sodium hydroxide, a caustic chemical. In Juno Beach, Fla., Policeman Harry Browning, 27, began vomiting within seconds of drinking Tropicana orange juice that could have been injected with insecticide. In the Detroit area, two razor blades and one nail were found in packages of Ball Park Franks within 24 hours last week...
...Describing Arnold as a "closet chemist," police searched his house and turned up a suspicious-looking plastic bag of white powder, along with drug manuals that contained instructions for encapsulating cyanide. A lab test found the powder to be a harmless carbonate, but Arnold admitted that he had kept sodium cyanide in his basement several months ago for "experiments." Nevertheless, Chicago police insist that Arnold, now out on bail, "is not a prime suspect at this time...