It's Okay To Be Smart

About Pepper Spray - The Dose Makes the Poison

This weekend, we were repeatedly sprayed in the retinas by a full-bore stream of shocking police brutality, thanks to the pepper-spraying incident (and its continuing fallout, and the meme-of-questionable-taste) at UC-Davis.

But what IS ”pepper spray”? What’s the chemistry and the medical background behind Officer Pike’s brutality cannon?

I can tell you that it’s a helluva lot worse than rubbing your eyes after making salsa. Pepper spray is “pepper” in name alone. This is pure chemical capsaicin extracts, and there are certifiable health risks (mental and physical) associated with its use. Deborah Blum reviews those in a piece on the guest blog at SciAm:

But we’ve taken to calling it pepper spray, I think, because that makes it sound so much more benign than it really is, like something just a grade or so above what we might mix up in a home kitchen. The description hints maybe at that eye-stinging effect that the cook occasionally experiences when making something like a jalapeno-based salsa, a little burn, nothing too serious.

Until you look it up on the Scoville scale and remember, as toxicologists love to point out, that the dose makes the poison. That we’re not talking about cookery but a potent blast of chemistry. So that if OC spray is the U.S. police response of choice – and certainly, it’s been used with dismaying enthusiasm during the Occupy protests nationwide, as documented in this excellent Atlantic roundup - it may be time to demand a more serious look at the risks involved.

(via Guest Blog, Scientific American)

Source: blogs.scientificamerican.com