For the past decade, pharmaceutical companies have cited ethical and legal reasons to block their drugs being used in lethal injections. A recent CNBC article noted the most recent case in which a twice-convicted killer wanted to be put to death, but a last-minute lawsuit from Alvogen, maker of one of the drugs in the three-drug injection, prevented it.
Alvogen claimed via court documents that Nevada prison officials illegally obtained the sedative midazolam, and the company doesn’t want its product used in a “botched” execution. “Midazolam is not approved for use in such an application,” the document said. The drug was substituted in May to replace expired prison stocks of diazemab, a similar sedative also known as Valium.
Last year, an execution fiasco in Arkansas left drug manufacturers scrambling to figure out how the state's Department of Correction got their hands on a supply of lethal injection drugs.
![“Another key [UDI] benefit, because we're calling that product by the same name across the healthcare supply chain… rich and robust data that we can access around supply consumption and utilization rates. One of the buzz terms we've heard during the COVID-19 crisis was what's my burn rate? How fast am I going through gowns, masks, gloves?” – Mike Schiller, Senior Director at AHRMM](https://img.healthcarepackaging.com/files/base/pmmi/all/image/2020/08/UDI.5f4d326e41d53.png?auto=format&fit=crop&h=146&w=340)
