(Host) Can researchers find a non-lethal drug that could be released into the air of a room or building, and that might knock out hostages and their captors long enough to save the hostages, who would soon recover? Ruth Page reports that some scientists think it will be possible.
(Page) “Calmative.” I love the look and sound of that word. I don’t think I’d ever run across it until I read it in Scientific American, but I instantly thought to myself, “Wow, are there ever a lot of days when I could use some of that.” Presumably, a calmative makes you calm. Calm when you think about war in the Middle East. Calm when the administration raises the national warning color to orange (or “Watch it! Here they come!”). Calm when I left water running in the bathroom in our brand new apartment while I watched Jeopardy, and didn’t notice until the water overflowed from the bathroom into the new bedroom carpet.
Unfortunately, that’s not what “calmative” means to the military. It means, for example, “something to knock out hostage takers so you can rescue their captives.” Remember last fall when Russians sprayed gas into a theater where Chechen rebels were holding 700 hostages? They got the 700 out, but a hundred of them died from the spray, partly because medics didn’t know how to treat those who couldn’t re-awaken.
That occurrence caused the U.S. brass, which had been considering whether some kind of temporary knockout gas might be useful in our present war-clouded world, to decide considerable research may be needed first. Examination of the medical literature for some pharmaceutical compound that would be a calming, non-lethal drug, suggested it was possible.
Workers in a Pennsylvania State University laboratory studied possibilities and agreed there would be some agent that was fast-acting, short-lived and reversible. They and others identified a whole batch of compounds to test for such action. In a long list of types of medications that might work, they included diazepam, or Valium, well known to many folks in the U.S. But such safe drugs don’t act quickly enough, and those that act fast may be too dangerous unless some better-controlled way of using them is found.
In the Moscow example, an opiate was pumped into the build-ing via the ventilation system. That meant some people inhaled a heavier dose than others as the stuff floated in the air.
Discussions and testing of similar agents will no doubt continue for a long time. Someone may even have to make a decision to use a drug that’s reliable but just might kill some of the people; if it rescues far more, is it worthwhile? Russia did succeed in rescuing six hundred hostages out of seven hundred taken, and it certainly seemed that to go after the bad guys by forceful means would have killed many more.
This is Ruth Page in Shelburne.