Inventor of Midazolam Opposes Its Use in Executions

As U.S. phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies have removed med­i­cines from the mar­ket to pre­vent states from obtain­ing them for exe­cu­tions, states have turned to alter­na­tives, like the seda­tive mida­zo­lam. Dr. Armin Walser, who was part of the team that invent­ed the drug in the 1970s, is dis­mayed at that devel­op­ment. ​“I didn’t make it for the pur­pose” of exe­cut­ing pris­on­ers, Dr. Walser told The New York Times. ​“I am not a friend of the death penal­ty or execution.” 

For most of mida­zo­lam’s his­to­ry, the med­i­cine was used only for its intend­ed pur­pose: as a seda­tive in pro­ce­dures like colono­scopies and car­diac catheter­i­za­tions. Since 2009, how­ev­er, six states have used it to car­ry out a total of 20 exe­cu­tions. Midazolam’s use in exe­cu­tions has been marked by con­tro­ver­sy because, crit­ics argue, it is a seda­tive, not an anes­thet­ic, and does not ade­quate­ly anes­thetize the con­demned pris­on­er before painful exe­cu­tion drugs are administered. 

Megan McCracken, a spe­cial­ist in lethal injec­tion lit­i­ga­tion with the University of California-Berkeley law school said, ​“Time and time again when you see exe­cu­tions with mida­zo­lam, you see, at best, sur­pris­es and, at worst, very bad executions.” 

Midazolam was used in the botched exe­cu­tions of Dennis McGuire in Ohio, Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma, Joseph Wood in Arizona, and Ronald Smith in Alabama. In January 2017, a fed­er­al mag­is­trate judge barred Ohio from using mida­zo­lam in exe­cu­tions, say­ing that its use pre­sent­ed a sub­stan­tial and objec­tive­ly intol­er­a­ble risk of seri­ous pain and suf­fer­ing dur­ing exe­cu­tions. As a result of lit­i­ga­tion chal­leng­ing Arizona’s lethal injec­tion pro­to­col in the wake of Wood’s exe­cu­tion, that state agreed that it would nev­er again use mida­zo­lam.

The man­u­fac­tur­er of the drug has said it ​“did not sup­ply mida­zo­lam for death penal­ty use and would not know­ing­ly pro­vide any of our med­i­cines for this pur­pose,” leav­ing states to turn to alter­na­tive sup­pli­ers if they want to con­tin­ue using mida­zo­lam in exe­cu­tions. Walser said that, when he learned about mida­zo­lam’s use in exe­cu­tions, ​“I did­n’t feel good about it.”