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Incapacitating Chemical Agents: Coming Soon To Local Law Enforcement?
Lasrick writes To this day, Russian authorities refuse to disclose the incapacitating chemical agent (ICA) they employed in their attempt, 12 years ago, to save 900 hostages held in a theater by Chechen fighters. Malcom Dando elaborates on a new report (PDF) that Russia, China, Israel, and a slew of other countries are continuing research into ICAs, and the apparent indifference of the international community into such research. Proponents of ICAs have long promoted their use in a variety of scenarios, including that of law enforcement, because in theory these chemicals incapacitate without permanent disability. Critics, however, point out that these weapons rely on exact dosage to prevent fatality, and that the ability to 'deliver the right agent to the right people in the right dose without exposing the wrong people, or delivering the wrong dose' is a near-impossible expectation. ICAs represent the further misuse and militarization of the life sciences and a weakening of the taboo against the weaponization of toxic substances, and the idea that they could be used in law enforcement situations is a disturbing one."
The result is a stopped heart. So what's the difference?
Also, if you can save 400 of 500 in a hostage situation and catch all the 10+ terrorists. Go for it. The terrorists would kill them anyway and if they escape, they can continue their business.
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Isn't it common knowledge that the chemical they used was Fentanyl? A very powerful synthetic opiate. And isn't it also well known that a significant percentage of the hostages died as a result?
So much for 'incapacitate without permanent disability.' Another overkill weapon in the untrained hands of local law enforcement. Yay.
US-Americans would NEVER do such things.
Nobody will use it, at least in US. Local agencies are filled with trigger happy psychos who get their satisfaction by unloading guns.
It is dangerous and twisted country. Largest population of own citizens imprisoned.
USA after North Korea are to be avoided by everybody with common sense.
Until a proper stun setting is found, it must at least be given up to law enforcement to for researching non-lethal means of control. Even the recent events in Ferguson demonstrate the desperate need here. And perhaps, when lethal weapons are done away with those who don't belong in law enforcement will leave?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Unfortunately Hollywood promises us that knock-out gas is a one-size-fits-all product.
Would I rather get hideously disfigured by a pistol bullet or nerve gas? It doesn't really make a difference but, like every Russian hostage siege, they screwed up massively.
Exact dosage is impossible, so how many civilian casualties are acceptable per knocked out assailant? Will you passively let people be killed by not using the gas, or actively kill a few to save more?
I don't understand how this situation can be interesting enough to dedicate newspaper articles to it over and over. It never changes. The answers never change. People arguing that theirs is the only correct one never change. Maybe condemning the actions of others of a different ethical persuasion never gets old? That almost has to be it. Everything else stays the same.
Haha. This is like a psychiatrist ordering a deadly psych drug cocktail claiming its safe when in reality it causes severe irreversible and accumulative damage.
Remember it takes one exposure to many types of anesthesia drugs to cause permanent long term memory loss and increased risk of dementia (which is not noticeable by the person exposed, and impacts nearly everyone because anesthesia is used routinely in all sorts of operations.).
Risk of death increases 17% with anticonvulsant and antianxiety and sleep aid drugs.
People who take antipsychotics get swelling of the brain, scar tissue, and fluid build up.
I wouldn't want the police to be able to use shit on me like this!! Fuck big pharma!! No chemical on earth can safely be used without damaging cells, CNS, or other functions.
http://www.OregonStateHospital.net/resources.html
This stuff wouldn't be allowed in warfare, why is it allowed in use by civilian agencies?
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
Non-lethal weapons would allow protestors to protest without getting killed. It is fair easier for a live person to argue their case in court than a corpse. The important thing here is to take away the governments ability to kill.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
When they can't run they make an easier target.
"There is no agreed definition of incapacitating chemical agents"
"incapacitate without permanent disability"
That's how I would define the end result of pepper spray.
At what point do we decide that giving the ruling classes more and more technological weapons to use against its citizens is a sign that our system of government has failed ? i think that happened a while ago to be honest. If your government needs weapons to stay in power its not leadership its tyranny.
I reject the assumption that the worlds need weapons to be safe , we need NO weapons to be truely safe.
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In 2004, VIctoria Snelgrove was hit in the eye with a pepper spray bullet by the Boston Police as part of crowd control (for a non-riotous crowd that was not responding to their commands). She subsequently died of her injury.
Non-lethal ICA? No such thing.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
As the USA nears bottom in its slide toward becoming a complete corporatist police state, I see no surprises in any new "law enforcement tool". Hell, the cops have AFV's, drones, and crew-served weapons. Why not chem warfare, right?
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
The most popular sleeping agent in Russia is diethyl ether (C4H10O).
Surely you meant MUSLIMS? Afraid to tell the truth? Who needs the truth, when we can lie about reality, and allow thousands more people to be killed by muslims?
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaver_(Firefly)#Origin
Look, even the summary above makes it clear that "lethality" is usually dose-dependent, and that dosage control is practically impossible in most real-world crowd-control situations. The Snelgrove tragedy is completely unrelated to that issue.
Whether the police are shooting rounds of pepper spray, lead, VX, or candy-canes, if one of them enters your eye socket at high enough velocity, it's unlikely to be "non-lethal". Let's stay focused on the real issue here, the mythology of "non-lethal" chemical incapacitants, and not get distracted by the obvious "don't shoot people in the face with rounds of anything".
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During the raid, all 40 of the attackers were killed, with no casualties among spetznas, but about 130 hostages died due to adverse reactions to the gas (including nine foreigners).[3] All but two of the hostages who died during the siege were killed by the toxic substance pumped into the theater to subdue the militants.[4][5] The use of the gas was widely condemned as heavy-handed, but the American and British governments deemed Russia's actions justifiable.[6] Physicians in Moscow condemned the refusal to disclose the identity of the gas that prevented them from saving more lives. Some reports said the drug naloxone was successfully used to save some hostages.[7]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Research in this area is probably a good thing if done right. Mace, tear gas, and stun guns are not
very effective in a large crowd or hostage situation. I agree with the article that current methods
rely on exact dosage to prevent fatality but it's highly probable that we can find better chemicals that don't.
Marijuana is one of many known substances where the effective dose and the lethal dose are orders of
magnitude apart. Research into incapacitating substances with very low effective doses but very high
lethal doses would be where I would want to focus. Something like this would be very useful. You could
make everyone pass out and then isolate the bad guys before they wake up saving both civilian and
criminal lives.
"... their attempt, 12 years ago, to save 900 hostages held in a theater by Chechen fighters."
In fact, 130 of those hostages died due to the gas. Is that a victory? Is that considered an effective tactic?
Evolutionary pressure will tend to select for individuals who can survive and resist these agents.
Five generations, maybe ten, and we'll have a sub-population of insurgents who drink incapacitant agents from breakfast.
-kgj
"Scotty, put the ship's phasers on stun. Fire a burst in a one-block radius around these co-ordinates." Worked for Captain Kirk. The bad guys all fell down and none of them smacked their heads or fell off a cliff or...
It calms people down, and since there are no THC receptors in the brainstem, high doses aren't life-threatening. You might need a lot of it though, and an unintended consequence may be that people would deliberately try to get police to use it on them.
Expected time to finish is 1 hour and 60 minutes.
The mysterious gas is Fentanyle, in gaseus form, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... .Fentanyle is 100 times more potent than morphine
This particular Fentanyle has been manufactured and supplied by one pharmaceutical manufacturer in Kaunas, Lithuania, albeit prior to 1991. There were investigative journalists who have covered this topic exhaustively, in details several years ago.
Fentanyle has been used in Nord Ost operation and it was not a success. Hundreds of hostages died from overdose and Russians do not like to bring this instance of heavy handed handling of situation.
With such a large portion of our US population taking medications for things like diabetes, blood pressure, psychiatric problems not to mention a myriad of other minor debilitating diseases it would be irresponsible of our government to incapacitate a large crowd of people. The incapacitated would be subjected to jail like conditions and not have proper and timely medical services.
They would have no assurance that the ringleaders would be affected.
Likely scenario: 5 of the 12 terrorists got away; 50 of the innocent bystanders died of medical problems; 200 now have strange and persistant symptoms the government will not acknowledge (like our soldiers returning from Afganistan.); and finally another 300 with no medical problems but who want to ride this cash-cow gravy train.
Thay's my 2 minutes of thinking about this while drinking my first cup of warm beverage this cold morning. Knowing a lawyer who used to be my brother this sounds like a lawyers' wet dream.
My memory is probably lacking here. . . . but I thought the gas was a Fentanyl based one. A quick glance over at Wiki confirms my memory is still somewhat intact I suppose:
" A gas, it is presumed, based on a derivative of fentanyl was used in 2002 in the Moscow theatre hostage crisis to incapacitate Chechen terrorist attackers (and their hostages) too quickly for them to retaliate. More than 15% of those affected died, including 117 of the 800 hostages. "
As far as I'm concerned, the police forces of the United States do not need any further toys to play with / test out on their " battlefield ". We already have more than enough evidence of less than lethal devices ( read that Tasers ) being used as compliance devices instead of the non-lethal alternatives they were supposed to be.
In other words, if the officer has no justification in drawing his firearm, he also has no justification in pulling the Taser either.
Until we have a full blown independent system that polices the police, we don't need to provide them with any more means to terrorize the citizens of this country. Trust in Law Enforcement is already at an all time low in this country. If they keep pushing, they may soon get the " battlefield " they've always wanted. Unfortunately for them, battlefields are rarely one-way affairs. If they consider us the enemy, ( any non-LE typically is the enemy in their eyes ) then they had best realize we vastly outnumber and outgun them in every aspect.
For you LE's out there, imagine a job where you are in harms way every moment of every day from every citizen of this country. If you don't start culling the bad apples out, we'll simply start viewing you as you do us.
As the enemy.
When that day comes, (insert your favorite deity here) help you.
Now a brown smell. Progress.
It wasn't the chemicals, as you point out, but the penetrating object that killed her. She bled out. If she hadn't bled out, she would have likely suffered severe brain damage as skull and projectile fragments entered her cranium.
The relevance being, also as you point out, that shooting anything into the face is a bad idea when non-lethality is the intent. But any chemical that is going to be delivered in such a way has exactly that potential, as do rubber bullets (have you seen what those do? non-lethal does not mean non-damaging).
Any chemical means to convince a highly agitated crowd to cease and disperse is going to have extraordinarily strong effects, even when used correctly, with some suffering the effects more than others. Some fraction of the population is always going to be sufficiently vulnerable for lethality.
Ultimately, I think we're agreed: The very idea of a non-lethal chemical weapon is absurd.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Just flood the compartment with Anesthizine gas.
Hey, it looks like they are developing Stumm gas...
Maybe if the police spent more time actually digging to find gangs and individuals enabled by gangs to use incapacitating agents as well as disruptors of short to long term memory pathways, instead of FUCKING MAKING IT EASIER FOR CRIMINALS.... *headslap*.... oh wait, we forgot the famous quote regarding the fine line between the policemen and the criminals...
There is pretty obvious link: "The mythology of 'non-lethal' chemical incapacitants", as you put it, is quite similar to the mythology of other non-lethal weapons that, in fact, do kill people.
Doesn't matter. If that particular combination of payload and delivery system resulted in at least one human life ending prematurely, then by dictionary definition it's lethal.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
"We ordered them to freeze and stop all movement. They kept breathing. They brought their deaths on themselves."
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
The world doesn't need weapons to be safe but groups of humans do.
A disarmed world is not a stable equilibrium as there's no incentive for a given subculture not to arms themselves and gain more influence over other sub cultures with the threat of violence. As such all sub cultures need to be prepared to deal with a hypothetical armed sub culture, and that usually means arming themselves as a deterrent.
Biology doesn't work that way. juts because a substance would be really convenient doesn't mean it's chemically possible for it to exist.
Rendering someone incapacitated is inherently dangerous because simply banging your head as you fall from standing to prone can be deadly. Further the parts of human biology that make good targets for disabling a person also tend to be the parts you'd attack to kill them.
My first thought was -- what if it hits a kid or small adult? I'd guess their dosage assumes a roughly 150 pound adult, because that way it'll stop the "more dangerous" persons. I guess anyone under the presumed body mass had better not get hit, eh?
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