I’ve been mulling over an idea.
Antifa has been spray painting on and posting online “spicy air, don’t care.”
Fine.
I have a background in Chemistry and a total lack of morals.
Allow me to introduce you to a family of chemicals called thiols, also known as mercaptans.
They are all organic compounds with a sulfur functional group.
R-S-H
Methylmercaptan is added to natural gas to make it smell so people can detect gas leaks in only a few PPM quantities.
Thiols are responsible for the smell of rotten eggs. There are three thiols in skunk spray. This is why you can tell when a skunk was hit by a car miles away.
Here is a fun little video on the subject.
The worst thiol by far, I mean by a wide margin, is thioacetone. It is in family by itself known a thiokeytones.
This still is listed as the smelliest chemical in the world.
One of my favorite science bloggers has is in his list of “stuff I won’t work with.”
This is an anecdote about how bad it is from his blog.
“Recently we found ourselves with an odour problem beyond our worst expectations. During early experiments, a stopper jumped from a bottle of residues, and, although replaced at once, resulted in an immediate complaint of nausea and sickness from colleagues working in a building two hundred yards away. Two of our chemists who had done no more than investigate the cracking of minute amounts of trithioacetone found themselves the object of hostile stares in a restaurant and suffered the humiliation of having a waitress spray the area around them with a deodorant. The odours defied the expected effects of dilution since workers in the laboratory did not find the odours intolerable … and genuinely denied responsibility since they were working in closed systems. To convince them otherwise, they were dispersed with other observers around the laboratory, at distances up to a quarter of a mile, and one drop of either acetone gem-dithiol or the mother liquors from crude trithioacetone crystallisations were placed on a watch glass in a fume cupboard. The odour was detected downwind in seconds.”
It is viscerally smelly. Not just cover your nose smelly. It is involuntarily wretch and gag smelly.
So if you are picking up what I am putting down, it’s time to do away with the pepper spray and CS gas.
Start hosing down Antifa with thioacetone.
Absolute, non-stop, uncontrollable crippling, wrenching and vomiting.
Thiols penetrate the skin (anyone who has been sprayed by a skunk knows what I’m talking about) so that smell will stick to them for days and weeks making their life unlivable.
Since the government has decided that Antifa isn’t yet ready to be shot with real bullets, but they’ve developed an immunity to pepper spray, it’s time to go with a bit rougher chemistry.
I like the way you think! Thioacetone smoke canisters? Liquid would be too likely to blow back on the handler.
Finally, a topic for the chemists in the audience. I’m an organic chemist by trade, and I can concur that most thiols and sulfide compounds smell foul beyond description. But, there are a couple problems with the implementation of this chemical agent for riot control.
1) How are you going to synthesize/formulate a product that works by smell, but doesn’t contaminate the atmosphere of the surrounding area. I can forsee a lot of problems deploying this near residential areas. Some people are incredibly sensitive to sulfide smells and won’t appreciate having the air outside their window becoming noxious.
2) Most thiols and sulfides are easily oxidized to their corresponding sulfates and sulfones with household bleach. Those byproducts are usually odorless. Any chemist doing work with sulfides will typically have a beaker of bleach for cleaning glassware to keep smells to a minimum.
Personally, I think there’s some room for development of better CS agents (e.g. less environmental impact, less chronic toxicity, etc.). If this keeps up we’re eventually going to lose our phobia about using water cannons.
The bleach thing it a plus, easy decontamination after you used the chemical to disperse the crowd. Bleach-water and hoses and you can clean the area up.
I should have expanded upon that point. If the police can use bleach for decontamination, then so can Andy Tifa. They already keep milk in reserve for OC decontamination (questionable effectiveness).
Hmmm… according to WIkipedia, trithioacetone has pretty darn low toxicity. I can’t offhand find toxicity data for thioacetone itself, but it doesn’t sound particularly dangerous in terms of actually poisoning the recipients.
Dispensing… a crop-duster drone, maybe? With a heater to crack the (apparently fairly innocuous) trimer?
I LIKE the drone idea!
I believe the Israelis have something like this, though the “family” of the smell may be different.
One report I saw the biggest whining was about how “humiliated” the Palestinians who were sprayed with it felt.
If you’re looking for a suitable organic substance look no further than lutefisk.
Derek Lowe is one of my favorite writers about science.
On smelly things, https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2012/05/15/things_i_wont_work_with_selenophenol is a great one, especially the part describing how its discoverer found out the hard way how smelly it is. That’s back in the old days when chemists would make something and stick their nose over the test tube.
Slightly different, but interesting also is https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_save_you_this_time — that substance is also mentioned in the wonderful book “Ignition!” which discusses rocket fuel research. Imagine a compound that will set concrete on fire… and actually has real world applications.
Wonderfully fun book, Ignition!
I love Chlorine Triflouride. The Germans called it N-Stoff (substance N), and they created super soakers full of the stuff to spray on French bunkers during the Blitz. The idea was it would cause the concrete that the bunkers were made out of to burn. They abandoned the idea because it was so difficult to handle they could never deploy the stuff safely.
The rocket fuel that ignited the concrete it was spilled on?
Yup. Who would have figured.
Actually, it is storable in Nickel. If you prep the nickel with HF (which is dangerous shit on its own, I have used a lot of it) it will form an insoluble layer of Nickel Fluoride that protects it the way surface oxides protect other metals from rusting. But once you breach that Nickel Fluoride it won’t repassivate when exposed to ClF3, so it just burns.
According to Lowe, ClF3 is used in semiconductor manufacturing to clean things. Makes sense, it gets rid of anything organic.
He writes about another amusing oxidizer, this one so unstable that it needs to be stored at liquid nitrogen temperatures. And even then it will react explosively with just about anything. The substance? F2O2, or “FOOF” to remind you of what it’s like.
Pretty much everything he wrote in that blog category (there are dozens of articles) is interesting, humorous, and very good.
I’ve heard of FOOF but I have no experience with it. Yes with ClF3 because it utterly destroys silicates where it’s used as an etchant for removing synthetic quartz.
I’ve been working with HF for years. I’ve even boiled things in it.
The worst I’ve ever done is mixed a 1:1:1 HF/HN03/H2SO4 reagent. It was angry.
He’s more squeamish about explosives than I am, then again, I’m working on a MS in Explosives Engineering. So things that go boom are my meat-n-potatoes.
The two on my list that I don’t think he covered are organo-mercury compounds and crown ethers.
Organic mercuries go after your brain and there is no gloves that will protect you, it goes through nitrile and rubber like it’s not there.
Crown ethers destroy testicles like the worst fantasies of an angry feminist drunk on half a box of Franzia while binge watching The Handmaid’s Tale.
Good plan. When does your product go on the market?
Pretty sure the military has had this around since 1900’s + nauseating agents + super slimy can’t walk stuff, ++++ other very nasty ones IF SHTF.
Can someone purchase some of this stuff in, say, paintball form? Asking for a friend.
This in paintball format would make me go get some paint ball guns. The pepper balls were to tightly controlled and I didn’t want to make my own. But the idea of a smell bomb is really good.
Maybe a mixture of paintball rounds. Smell, capstain(sp), regular paint, iching powder, and the spikes of those flat cacti.
When I was younger, the area just behind my yard were thes cacti growing, Maybe opuntia humifusa. My brother and I used them as weapons. While they had these little nasty needle spikes, those were easy to avoid. It was the little fuzzy spots that were nasty. These fuzzy spots were made up with a barbed hair. If you brushed against them you would end out with hundreds of these needle like hair/splinters stuck in your skin. So fine you could hardly see them. But if you brushed against them in your skin it did feel like somebody was poking you with needles.
So attack the pain sensors with CS, mark them with paint, drive them to itching fits, make them smell so bad they want to wretch and drive them full of little 1/4 inch long barbed hair/spliters.
As someone with experience in the oil and gas industry, has anyone considered sprinkling them down with powdered frac gel and then some water (or do it on a rainy day?)
Powdered frac gel is simply freeze-dried ocean bottom sea creatures. A mere cup of the powder will expand IMMENSELY with the addition of water (about two cups of water will suffice). It is quite smelly and VERY, VERY slimy – think the first Ghostbusters movie where Bill Murray gets “slimed” and you have the idea.
Washing it off can be done with major amounts of water, and if you put your clothes in the washing machine, kiss the washer goodbye and have your wallet handy when the plumbers start unclogging your sewer.
Best part:
Environmentally friendly. No harsh chemicals.
I am intrigued. I have to wonder if this is even something you can legally buy.
According to this: https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/catalog/product/aldrich/w347507?lang=en®ion=US
Is that the right shytte?
It’s $177 for 25 grams… Is that a lot? A little? Deployment means? I’ma ALL about this stuff. Load it to the exterior of a large firework and blow it? Inquiring minds want to know bro! I have ZERO compunction of spending the scrim if’n it f’s up the OPFOR.
Armed with a dangerous mind….. another great item to add to paint balls- yellow jacket attractive from bee traps. Works wonders..
where can I get some?
Derek Lowe also mentioned organic tellurides, which supposedly smell so bad and are so persistent that getting some on you will cause involuntary celibacy for up to a year or so.
That would be great stuff for this application; the only problem is making it and deploying it without yourself falling victim to its properties.