{"id":4229,"date":"2017-03-25T22:52:41","date_gmt":"2017-03-26T02:52:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/?p=4229"},"modified":"2017-03-25T22:52:41","modified_gmt":"2017-03-26T02:52:41","slug":"understanding-pepper-oc-spray-ratings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2017\/03\/25\/understanding-pepper-oc-spray-ratings\/","title":{"rendered":"Understanding pepper (OC) spray ratings"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Pepper spray has <a href=\"http:\/\/wwlp.com\/2014\/09\/26\/new-law-for-buying-and-carrying-pepper-spray\/\">been legal in Massachusetts<\/a> without any sort of permit required for a few years now. It&#8217;s also known as OC spray, from the extracted <em>oleoresin capsicum<\/em>, being an <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Oleoresin\">oleoresin<\/a> formed from capsicum, the ingredient that makes hot peppers spicy.<\/p>\n<p>I recently picked some up, and would like to share a few things I&#8217;ve learned.<\/p>\n<h2>Where to buy pepper spray<\/h2>\n<p>Finding pepper spray in MA can be hard. I&#8217;ve seen it in lots of places across the border in New Hampshire, but it&#8217;s hard to find in Massachusetts. Making it worse, shipping it to Massachusetts is either prohibited, or thought by online merchants like Amazon to be prohibited. I ended up picking mine up in a sporting\/gun shop.<\/p>\n<h2>Why all the numbers are meaningless<\/h2>\n<p>But here&#8217;s the part that really trips me up: the ratings. The spray I purchased is listed as &#8220;10% OC (2 million SHU).&#8221; Intuitively, I assumed this meant that it was 10% of the maximum strength possible. (If 10% is 2 million SHU, the maximum must be 20 million SHU.) <strong>But this is totally wrong!<\/strong> The SHU rating or the percentage alone are meaningless numbers.<\/p>\n<p>What this <strong>actually<\/strong> means is this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The solution in the canister is 10% oleoresin capsicum, and 90% other stuff (inert ingredients). If this number were 100%, I assume it would be a sticky goop that you couldn&#8217;t spray, so it&#8217;s necessary that a decent percentage of the contents be something like water or propylene glycol.<\/li>\n<li>The OC that&#8217;s in the spray is rated at 2 million Scoville heat units (SHU).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>As an analogy: you have a rum and Coke, which is about 25% rum and 75% Coke. The rum used is 80-proof, or 40% alcohol. If your goal is to get drunk, neither of those metrics is meaningful on its own. 25% rum doesn&#8217;t necessarily tell you how strong the alcohol is, and &#8220;The rum in this Coke is 100 proof!&#8221; isn&#8217;t good news if they only put a dollop of it in your drink. What you&#8217;d actually want to know is the <em>total<\/em> amount of alcohol.<\/p>\n<p>The same is true of OC spray. Sabre, one manufacturer of pepper spray, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sabrered.com\/blog\/pepper-spray-strength-how-hot-it-really\">has a blog post explaining<\/a> that you need to consider the product of the two numbers, known as the percentage of Major Capsaicinoids, or MC. The same math is discussed in a number of places; the Sabre blog post is just the first place I saw the math given a name.<\/p>\n<p>Pure capsaicin is <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Scoville_scale#Pure_chemicals\">16 million Scoville heat units<\/a>. So if the oleoresin capsicum in my canister of pepper spray is 2 million SHU, it&#8217;s 2\/16 = 12.5% of the maximum strength.<\/p>\n<p>But only 10% of the canister is OC, so it&#8217;s 12.5% \u00d7 10% = 1.25% MC. (Well, the Sabre article uses the same starting numbers to arrive at 1.33%. I&#8217;ll assume that I&#8217;m the one that&#8217;s off on the math.)<\/p>\n<p>A competing product is marketed as 6% and 3 million SHU. That&#8217;s 18.7% \u00d7 6% = 1.122% MC. Other sources have higher SHU ratings at lower percentages. This all gets very confusing, because manufacturers seem to just decide whether they want to market their product on having a high-percentage of OC, or on a high SHU number. You <em>need<\/em> to compare the total percentage of capsicum if you want to do any sort of meaningful comparison.<\/p>\n<h2>Cleanup<\/h2>\n<p>If you&#8217;re going to carry pepper spray, you would probably do well to also carry something like these <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/ea-Fox-Labs-Sudecon-Decontamination\/dp\/B0094BFFQ0\/\">decontamination wipes<\/a> to help alleviate the effects, in case you end up getting some of the spray as well. (There are a few other products linked from there as well. Having never used any of them, I can&#8217;t recommend one over the other. All I can say is that Sudecon wipes fit in my glovebox nicely.)<\/p>\n<h2>Related compounds (science nerds take note!)<\/h2>\n<p>As mentioned above, the &#8220;active ingredient&#8221; in hot peppers is capsaicin. <em>Pure<\/em> capsaicin is 16 million Scoville heat units. The hottest pepper is the Carolina Reaper, around 1.5 million SHU. (You should <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=jlsiOcTsoUo&#038;t=3m28s\">definitely not vape it<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<p>However, capsaicin isn&#8217;t the hottest compound. That honor appears to belong to something even tougher to pronounce, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Resiniferatoxin\">Resiniferatoxin<\/a>. Found naturally in a plant known as <em>Euphorbia poissonii<\/em> (what could be scary about a plant whose Latin name is <em>poissonii<\/em>?), Wikipedia writes that it &#8220;causes severe burning pain in sub-microgram (less than 1\/1,000,000th of a gram) quantities when ingested orally.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>All of these compounds seem to act on a receptor in the body known as <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/TRPV1\">TRPV1<\/a>, which controls body temperature and &#8220;provides a sensation of scalding heat and pain.&#8221; There&#8217;s also a compound known as <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Capsazepine\">capsazepine<\/a> which inhibits the TRPV1 channel, effectively blocking the effects of capsaicin and its ilk. I&#8217;m yet to see it being marketed as an antidote to pepper spray, though.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Pepper spray has been legal in Massachusetts without any sort of permit required for a few years now. It&#8217;s also known as OC spray, from the extracted oleoresin capsicum, being an oleoresin formed from capsicum, the ingredient that makes hot &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2017\/03\/25\/understanding-pepper-oc-spray-ratings\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4229\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}