If you’ve been following the news, you might have heard about a California transplant surgeon who was recently charged with administering drugs to hasten the death of a comatose patient.  The facts of the case are still trickling out, but the case is definitely cringe-inducing even at this early state.  If the allegations are true, then it looks like this particular transplant surgeon ordered the administration of 200 mg of morphine and 80 mg lorazepam (both monster doses) to a patient just taken off of a ventilator.  The unstated goal, presumably, was to get the patient, who was still breathing after being taken off the ventilator, to expire so that he could be declared dead and his organs removed.  Now while I am all for taking brain-dead patients off of life support and even giving sedative drugs to provide end-of-life comfort, there was one really big line that was crossed in this case.  A transplant surgeon who is coming to harvest organs has zero authority to order drugs for a donor patient until the patient is dead.  This is to prevent any conflicts of interest on the part of the organ donation team.  The patient’s own care team, who ostensibly has the patient’s best interests at heart, gets to call all the shots until the patient expires.  Then, and only then, can the harvesting team do anything.  This serves to allay fears of would-be organ donors who might refuse to sign an organ donation card out of the concern that they would get suboptimal care if the doctors treating them were also greedily eyeing their organs.  One would hope that this fear was far-fetched, but cases like this only bring that fear back to the forefront.  The organ donation system has been struggling against negative sentiment like this for a long time, and it’s a damn shame that stupidity like this further injures a system that is only trying to help some of the genuinely neediest people around.