The amount of drugs used in lethal injections is trivial, not worth going through any efforts to make it possible, especially as - guess what - the executives and scientists at those companies are probably against having their drugs be used in executions as well! They got into pharma to save lives, not end them.

For instance, even the US firm Hospira apparently refuses to sell propofol to prisons and there's no ban against it in the US.

If you read some background articles, it appears that you're wrong - the only manufacturers of propofol at the moment are in the EU. It's very hard to make, and historically it was made by a company in the USA, a couple of companies in the EU and one in Israel. The Israeli company made it in a factory in the USA until their production runs started killing people due to bacterial infection. Both the US and Israeli company stopped. Now they're bringing it back, slowly, except not really - the Israeli firm outsourced to a company in Italy. Hospira (the US firm) meanwhile also has a policy of forbidding its drugs from being used in lethal injections.

The market for lethal injection is tiny, and the complexity of making the drug is extremely high. So there's no huge opportunity.

They're already in prison anyway. Unless your country routinely experiences prison breaks, it shouldn't make any difference.

I found an informative article. Summary: It says that essentially the US firm Hospira is unable to proceed due to the FDA not authorizing changes in the manufacturing process. Teva, an Israeli company, exited the business after what sounds like a combination of manufacturing issues and a large number of spurious lawsuits over a hepatitis C outbreak. The drug itself is extremely hard to manufacture, and profits are nearly non-existent so there's little incentive for competitors to enter the market.

Possibly the issue would be resolved if the FDA were to change the regulations, but again, no information on what exactly the problem is were reported.

RTFA - it says "Federal regulations make propofol difficult to manufacture in the United States". It does not elaborate on what those regulations are.

Is that meant to be a prediction, or a statement of fact? If you read the article it becomes clear that they had search warrants as part of a targeted investigation into organised crime, and apparently were surprised to discover the 3D printer at one of the searched areas. Given that they arrested someone because they think he was making gunpowder, and because you can't make gunpowder with a 3D printer, it seems that they believed (correctly) that someone was trying to manufacture ammo and got a judge to issue a warrant on that basis. When they discovered the printer, they made the obvious logical conclusion - someone who is illegally making guns, and has a 3D printer, might be experimenting with 3D printing plastic guns. What else would he use it for?

It may turn out in the course of events that the printer was used for something else, or making tools used to help make ammo rather than making gun parts, or something else. But ownership of the 3D printer is incidental. There isn't even any way they would know he had such a device, as far as I can tell.

Thanks for the corrections.

people were turning in unsharpened movie prop fantasy knives, kitchen utensils, and yard tools afraid they were going to get prosecuted for owning lethal weaponry

Yeah, those, and also real Klingon Bat'leths (I mean, with actual sharpened edges that could take someones head off). Along with machetes and lots of other things that typically aren't needed in suburban Britain.

I would expect panics about people 3D printing guns to be relatively commonplace in the UK and throughout Europe in future. Being an island, the UK has had a particularly effective form of gun control that has seen criminal gangs reduced to trying to make their own ammo and weapons, often shittily and resulting in much less lethal weapons than those professionally made. Random shootings are extremely rare. However plenty of Brits read the newspapers and see how the USA experiences lethal shootings seemingly every day at the moment, which is completely insane. Now I read that children as young as 12 are shooting their teachers.

Everyone in the UK knows that it tends to experience a lot of US "cultural imports", and basically nobody I know there would want to see US-style gun crime. So gun controls are likely to remain popular and if it takes licensing of 3D printing equipment to enforce that, it won't surprise me at all to see such a thing be implemented.

He did as much as was necessary to establish trust and no more.

I just want to say to Xavier - thanks. Great work.