I’ve written before about how the death penalty degrades everything it touches, and in the words of Thomas Paine, “leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws.” Doctors and other medical professionals complicit in the act of execution violate the Hippocratic oath to “do no harm.” Drug companies are unwillingly dragged into the business of killing, rather than healing. And now, a recent court ruling exposes how the the FDA, whose stated mission is to keep us safe from bad food and drugs, has abandoned its mandate in order to facilitate state executions.