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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

> Tasers didn’t always work on flakka users. And talking them down never did. Deputies had to wrestle users to the ground, punching them to gain control, Tianga said. The official protocol was to attack and attack hard. It looked brutal.

I don't really understand this. How can tazers not work? It's a physiological reaction, right? Electric current prevents your nerves from working. How is punching more effective than that?

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It's bullshit. Cops (and the media) will repeat and exaggerate the most preposterous nonsense they can find if the subject is drugs. Doubly so if it lets them excuse things they were going to do anyway, like beat the shit out of a black dude for giving them lip. What this article is describing is such a typical moral panic that it should be in a museum somewhere as a type specimen.

http://www.snopes.com/crime/warnings/jenkem.asp

Many TASER darts don't end up embedding properly in the skin, or come out on their own. Patients with excited delirium (a term that may or may not represent a distinct clinical phenomenon from stimulant-induced psychosis, and which may or may not have been invented by people trying to explain deaths occurring in custody) have been known to be "resistant" to the effects of conducted electrical weapons. It's tough to say whether they were functioning as intended in those circumstances or whether people are just ignoring the stimulus in the face of very powerful competing internal or external stimuli, amped up by really powerful and often dissociative stimulants.

I feel for the people that get called to deal with these people. In the ED I have access to drugs that can bring people down fairly quickly if necessary, and teams of people who are used to physically restraining people without hurting them. It doesn't always work the way we want it to, but we can generally get people safe without hurting them. Cops don't have that training or context, and I have a lot of admiration for the ones that can (and many do) deal with stuff like this without hurting people on a daily basis.

Someday we'll just have ketamine blow darts. (Seriously. Maybe.)

I've often wondered why we don't have 'tranquillizer dart guns' already. Given the issues with Tazers, how much worse can the dart gun be? Has it ever been studied?

> Given the issues with Tazers, how much worse can the dart gun be?

Let me change into my swim trunks, and we can go slip'n'sliding down this slope together.

Dosing problems: it's a fine line between sedating and killing and it's dependent on many factors you can't control for, especially from a distance. Sedatives can also react dangerously to drugs the person may already have in their system.

There's two levels of tasers, I think. The older and weaker kind causes a lot of pain, but doesn't totally disable your muscles. You can resist if you have a high pain tolerance or are too high to feel it.

There's a newer and stronger kind that's actually impossible to resist, but it might be less widespread, and it's also somewhat controversial because it's more dangerous and potentially deadly for people with heart problems.

Plus if it's a taser, where the probes are shot out, you can potentially be "stunning" a small area of the body, depending on how far away they were shot from. The video in the article shows a dude impaled on a fence for 30 minutes high on this stuff. If that doesn't show you the kind of pain tolerance you get...

This is a human interest piece. We have no need for science here. Another example: "The chemical attached itself to brain pathways with such ferocity..."

You see, this chemical was downright ferocious. We have anthropomorphized it past the point of science being relevant.

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