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United States I: New Research Offers Safer Incapacitating Chemicals By David Ruppe The Russian rescue has been criticized after it became clear that the chemical used to subdue the hostage-takers was responsible for killing up to 118 hostages (see GSN, Nov. 4). “I think the studies in this area are getting close, [but] we’re not perfect yet,” professor Theodore Stanley, an anesthesiology expert at the University of Utah’s medical school, said. There are currently drugs that have been researched in the United States and abroad that may be “10 times safer” than what the Russians are believed to have used, an aerosol based on the common anesthetic fentanyl. Some of the new chemicals are “similar” to fentanyl and some are not, he said. Stanley and others suspect Russia used either sufentanil or carfentanil, potent agents derived from fentanyl that have also been researched by the U.S. military. The new drugs are still in the early stages of research and it is not yet clear whether they could be both safe and effective enough to use, he said. “We haven’t done enough studies yet to know,” he said. A 1999 U.S. Defense Department document also alluded to promising agents, saying “recent pharmaceutical developments suggest that new approaches to safer chemical immobilizers with improved performance characteristics may be available.” That document solicited bids for research into promising new agents for use as incapacitants, examining “recent breakthroughs in the pharmacological classes such as anesthetics/analgesics, tranquilizers, hypnotics and neuromuscular blockers.” Complex Challenge Parker Ferguson, whose company, Optimetrics, won the contract for the initial phase of the Pentagon research, said major challenges remained to developing an incapacitant both potent enough to be effective and safe enough to use. “It’s often a tradeoff … It’s a very complex proposition,” he said. An abstract of his company’s bid for the work said recent studies suggested the existence of “three new agent combinations with potential for meeting user objectives.” Ferguson would not discuss the results of the work, for which he was the lead researcher. He said, though, that to his knowledge no one had yet solved the safety-effectiveness problem. The first phase of the Pentagon program was to analyze “promising new chemical immobilizing agents or combinations of agents.” The second phase, not yet initiated, would involve “establishing desired performance and operational characteristics with respect to potential scenarios of use.” A third phase would list various military and domestic law enforcement scenarios for which the technology might be used. U.S. Rejected Earlier Agent U.S. researchers for years sought to come up with an agent considered safe enough to use and so far have been unsuccessful, according to experts. During the 1960s, the U.S. military put a substantial amount of money into developing and weaponizing a delirium-causing agent called BZ. Those weapons were dismantled and the BZ destroyed, however, and since then the U.S. Army has not reported having any temporarily incapacitating munitions in its arsenal. Experts say the U.S. Army became disenchanted with the weapon because of its unpredictability. A 1969 National Security Council report said BZ was unlikely to be employed because of a “wide range of variability of effects, long onset time, and inefficiency of existing munitions.” An Army history cited the inability to find an agent that would satisfy “practical and political concerns.” The Chemical Weapons Convention, which entered into force in 1997, restricts BZ. Through a program for developing riot control chemicals, dating back to the 1970s, the military conducted research on derivatives of fentanyl — sufentanil and carfentanil — but found they could cause subjects to stop breathing, according to professor Matthew Meselson, co-director of the Harvard Sussex Program on Chemical and Biological Warfare Armament and Arms Limitation. Subsequent research involved mixing or chasing it with an antidote naloxone to reduce the danger of respiratory failure, he said. Safety Concerns Optimetric’s bid on the Pentagon’s 1999 solicitation said previous approaches to developing a safe and reliable immobilizing agent “were deficient in one or more technical aspects such as low safety ratios or inadequate performance characteristics. This program will lead to a capability that does not currently exist.” Fentanyl-derived drugs are found to be highly effective at depressing the nervous system, and ideal for the operating room because if administered correctly they cause no lasting health effects. “It’s one of the safest drugs that anesthesiologists have … If you know how to use it, it’s probably one of the safest drugs you could imagine,” said Stanley. An important consequence of its use, however, is that it can depress or inhibit respiration, which is acceptable when administered by an anesthesiologist, but potentially fatal in an uncontrolled environment. The drug is likely to be more dangerous for children than for adults, which could pose a problem when used on a crowd. Chemicals are already used for riot control, such as pepper spray and tear gas, which temporarily incapacitate through irritation. Ferguson said such chemicals are not ideal because they have been found to be ineffective on some people. “If you sprayed Ray Lewis, a middle linebacker from the Baltimore Ravens or someone like a defensive back for the Washington Redskins, they’d probably take your head off,” Ferguson said. A major part of the difficulty with using common fentanyl-derived products as incapacitants, Ferguson said, is being able to deliver an effective but safe dose to everyone who might come in contact with it. For instance, if Russian authorities had used the substance by putting it into the building air vents, he said, “the people underneath or right near the vent might get a lethal dose and others might not.” Treaty Concerns Arms control experts say that regardless of their safety, the development and use of nonlethal chemical incapacitants pose a challenge to several international legal norms related to the rules of war. The U.S. military views developing nonlethal chemical incapacitants in part as a solution for dealing with warfare situations involving innocent civilians. The National Research Council, part of the National Academies of Sciences, appeared to endorse that view in a preliminary report released this week, first reported by the Los Angeles Times (see GSN, Nov. 5). The report advocated more research into nonlethal chemicals “in accordance with U.S. treaty obligations in the Chemical Weapons Convention,” and said they had “compelling applications in engine stopping and crowd control that cannot be achieved by other means.” Mark Wheelis, a University of California-Davis microbiology professor who opposes chemical incapacitant development, said using temporarily incapacitating agents could weaken norms against targeting civilians, and soldiers who are incapacitated and unable to fight. “The entire justification from the JNLWD [the Pentagon’s Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate] point of view is the military is increasingly engaged in operations where combatants and noncombatants are intermixed,” said Wheelis. He said soldiers might understandably be tempted in combat to kill temporarily incapacitated adversaries before they regain their senses. The National Research Council report said weapons that deliver chemical contaminants to a crowd other than riot control agents would likely fail in meeting an international requirements agreed to at the Hague in 1907 requiring distinction between military and civilian targets and unnecessary suffering. “Perhaps R&D may be able to resolve the issue of discrimination as well as to focus on a legally permissible human effect, such as psychological impairment rather than physiological impairment,” it said.
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