Amobarbital was manufactured by Eli Lilly and Company in the United States under the brand name Amytal in bright blue bullet shaped capsules (known as Pulvules) or pink tablets (known as Diskets)[2] containing 50, 100, or 200 milligrams of the drug.

In an in vitro study in rat thalamic slices, amobarbital worked by activating GABAA receptors, which decreased input resistance, depressed burst and tonic firing, especially in ventrobasal and intralaminar neurons, while at the same time increasing burst duration and mean conductance at individual chloride channels; this increased both the amplitude and decay time of inhibitory postsynaptic currents.

[9] The use of amobarbital as a truth serum has lost credibility due to the discovery that a subject can be coerced into having a "false memory" of the event.

[11] It was used by the United States armed forces during World War II in an attempt to treat shell shock and return soldiers to the front-line duties.

[17] In Len Deighton's 1967 novel An Expensive Place to Die, a combination of amytal and LSD is used to make the unnamed protagonist respond to questioning about his activities.

In Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow, sodium amytal is used by a military intelligence unit as some kind of truth serum to extract Tyrone Slothrop's (the novel's protagonist) ideas on racism of white Americans against Afro-Americans during the 1930s in his home state of Massachusetts (Chapter 1).

[18][19][20] In the 1994 comedic action thriller True Lies, the protagonist Harry Tasker (portrayed by Arnold Schwarzenegger) is given sodium amytal as a truth serum, when questioned by terrorists.

In the 2005 movie, Hellraiser: Hellworld, the main antagonist uses "sodium amytal" to secretly anesthetize the people he believes were responsible for his son's death, and induce extreme hallucinations in them.

In 2016, television drama A Fist Within Four Walls episode 14, Man Zeun (portrayed by Princeton Lock) uses sodium amytal in an attempt to force gambling addict Lee Fat into paying debts.

In 2022, in "Diophantine Pseudonym", Episode 06 of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol, sodium amytal is used by the CIA as a truth serum.