Chemical Bodies by Alex Mankoo

Author:Alex Mankoo
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781786605870
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2018-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

THE SECOND HIMSWORTH REPORT

The committee was expanded in terms of membership and expertise, and its second report was published on 15 September 1971. Expanding on the logic of the ‘weapons as drugs’ approach, this report argued that drug safety had both a general and a particular element to it.26 At one level, there was general knowledge about the safety and toxicity of a drug. Such knowledge then needed, they explained, to be applied in a clinical context of balancing the severity of a patient’s illness against the risks of taking any particular dose of the drug. Shortly afterwards, the report noted that an ideal drug would be harmless regardless of dosage but, because such ideal drugs were rare or non-existent, that in reality, there should be some safety margin between the effective and harmful dose. The same principle, they argued, would apply when considering an riot control agent (RCA). Himsworth was thus forging an overt ‘translation’ – a term used in the report – of the CS problem from one primarily involving military expertise to one primarily involving medical expertise. Indeed, Himsworth points out that in the case of decisions about administering a toxic drug for treating cancer and for a ‘relatively trivial’ disease, ‘these are both medical considerations and the responsibility for striking the balance between them is purely a professional matter’.27

Having made a case for appropriating the CS problem to medical expertise, the committee recognized that the analogy could not undergo a smooth and seamless transition. In this respect, they noted that in an anti-riot situation, some decisions would be ‘purely medical’, in particular the health risks of the agent, while ‘others raise questions of social policy and must be assessed on political as well as medical grounds’.28 The committee also highlighted specific points of friction that had arisen when they tried to translate the anti-riot setting into the drug safety setting. While drugs, they reported, are generally administered on an individual basis in precise, calculated doses, tear gas is administered in the form of a smoke to groups, where any particular individual would be exposed to a highly circumstance-dependent amount of the agent.

This slippage from a controlled to uncontrolled situation continued. Those exposed could include both rioters and people in the vicinity including children, elderly people and pregnant women. Finally, the committee pointed out that with sparse evidence of the effects on humans, they needed to turn to animal experimentation data. These extrapolations – individual to population; healthy adult to more vulnerable; animal to human – were underpinned by a leap in spatial and socio-technical imaginaries.29 Despite acknowledging some points of friction, by declaring that the committee would adopt the analogy, the hostile and confrontational riot, with its accompanying confusion, contingencies and unpredictability, was reconfigured in the report as an orderly place where prediction, control and relative calm prevail. Likewise, the largely consensual situation of receiving a drug was linked to non-consensual crowd control. Arguably, this move also created an elision throughout the report between non-lethal and non-violent, because use of CS gas to quell civil disobedience still remains an act of violence.

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