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When a Common Sedative Becomes an Execution Drug (Published 2017)
MIDAZOLAM used for executions.

Armin Walser helped invent a sedative more powerful than Valium
more than 40 years ago, he thought his team’s concoction was
meant to make people’s lives easier, not their deaths.
Yet decades after the drug, known as midazolam, entered the
market, a product more often used during colonoscopies and
cardiac catheterizations has become central to executions
around the country and the debate that surrounds capital
punishment in the United States.
“I didn’t make it for the purpose,” Dr. Walser, whose drug has
been used for sedation during 20 lethal injections nationwide,
said in an interview at his home here. “I am not a friend of the
death penalty or execution.” Midazolam’s path from Dr. Walser’s
laboratory into use in at least six of the country’s execution
chambers has been filled with secrecy, political pressure,
scientific disputes and court challenges.
The most recent controversy is the extraordinary plan in Arkansas
to execute eight inmates in 10 days next month. The state is racing
the calendar: Its midazolam supply will expire at the end of April,
and given the resistance of manufacturers to having the drug
used in executions, Arkansas would most likely face major
hurdles if it tried to restock. In Arkansas, where no prisoner
has been put to death since November 2005, midazolam is
planned as the first of three drugs in the state’s lethal injections.
The drug is intended to render a prisoner unconscious and
keep him from experiencing pain later in the execution, when
other drugs are administered to stop the breathing and heart.