Fox's Megyn Kelly: Pepper Spray A Food Product, Essentially

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.

My own purpose here is to focus on the dangers of a high level of capsaicin exposure. But as pointed out in the 2004 paper, Health Hazards of Pepper Spray, written by health researchers at the University of North Carolina and Duke University, the sprays contain other risky materials:

If this weekend's attack on students had you wondering how bad pepper spray really is, science writer Deborah Blum has you covered . Answer: It's five times more intense than the hottest natural pepper in the world. (Commercial pepper spray is twice as intense, but the police-grade stuff is supercharged.)

pepper spray causes tissue inflammation, which means it can damage your eyes or swell your airways shut. There's plenty of scientific evidence that pepper spray can cause respiratory failure, especially in people with conditions like asthma, and it's been implicated in a number of deaths in police custody.

Clever Photoshop artists have turned the image of a police officer pepper-spraying Occupy Wall Street protesters into a fast-spreading internet meme.

Soon after Lt. John Pike was videotaped and photographed pepper-spraying protesters Friday on the University of California at Davis campus, the video of the confrontation went viral and a photo of the incident went up on reddit.