doesn't look like it
Potassium Chloride
Potassium chloride is the drug that causes death in an execution under current lethal injection protocols. Although the other two drugs are administered in lethal dosages and would, in time, produce the prisoner’s death, potassium chloride should cause cardiac arrest and death within a minute of injection.85 While potassium chloride acts quickly, it is excruciatingly painful if administered without proper anesthesia.86 When injected into a vein, it inflames the potassium ions in the sensory nerve fibers, literally burning up the veins as it travels to the heart.87 Potassium chloride is so painful that the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) prohibits its use as the sole agent of euthanasia—it may only be used after the animal has been properly anesthetized.88
There are less painful drugs that will cause death. For example, experts have suggested pentobarbital, which can be administered in a single injection. Indeed, this is the most common method of euthanizing domesticated animals.89 In Oregon, which has legalized physician-assisted suicide for the terminally ill, state doctors prescribe an overdose of barbiturates like pentobarbital for their dying patients. The state’s medical ethics board determined that an overdose from a long-acting barbiturate was the most humane way to help someone die—it is painless, effective, and does not require the presence of a doctor at the time of ingestion in pill form.90 According to a physician who consulted with Oregon legislators before the passage of the physician-assisted suicide bill in 1994, an overdose from a drug like pentobarbital is “the best death one could give someone who is suffering.”91
Medical experts have also recommended one lethal dosage of sodium thiopental without following it with other drugs. A single injection of this drug “has all the advantages and none of the disadvantages that other drugs manifest [which are] difficult, cumbersome, [and] amateurish to utilize.”92
Dr. Mark Dershwitz is a professor of anesthesiology who has been an expert witness on behalf of several states, defending their lethal injection protocols against constitutional challenges.93 Dershwitz told Human Rights Watch that state officials have asked him about drugs other than potassium chloride that they could use to induce cardiac arrest in a condemned inmate. He said they have asked specifically about “the vet option,” meaning the use of pentobarbital. Dershwitz recounted for Human Rights Watch how he explained to the officials the difference between the pharmacological effects of pentobarbital and potassium chloride:
The pharmacological effect of potassium chloride kills an inmate, and it happens quickly. If one uses just a large does of barbiturate, circulation will stop, the inmate will die, but it won’t happen in two minutes. Electrical activity in the heart may persist for a very long time, in healthy people almost certainly for more than a half an hour. Everyone involved will have to wait a very long time for the heart to stop.94
According to Dershwitz, no state corrections official whom he has told about the increased length of time pentobarbital may take to kill a condemned inmate has pursued using it instead of potassium chloride, even though pentobarbital is less painful. Human Rights Watch asked Dershwitz to explain why he thought corrections officials would risk using a painful drug like potassium chloride rather than a safer drug like pentobarbital; he said:
It’s not about the prisoner. It’s about public policy. It’s about the audience and prison personnel who have to carry out the execution. It would be hard for everybody to have to sit and wait for the EKG activity to cease so they can declare the prisoner dead.95
https://www.hrw.org/reports/2006/us0406/4.htm