Cocaine and pepper spray can kill you [Probably]
From the Dept. of WTF, New Scientist reports that a brain interaction between cocaine and capsaicin – the active ingredient in pepper spray – may have contributed to the deaths of nine people in police custody in California:
To investigate, [John Mendelson of the Addiction and Pharmacology Research Laboratory at St Luke’s Hospital in San Francisco] and his team injected cocaine, capsaicin or both at once into the abdomens of several groups of about 30. “The presence of capsaicin in mice makes smaller amounts of cocaine more lethal,” Mendelson says. ... His team also reviewed 26 autopsy reports and Californian police reports between 1993 and 1995 of people who died shortly after being subdued with pepper spray. They noted that 19 of them had evidence of psychostimulants in their blood and nine had cocaine. Mendelson suspects that a fatal interaction takes place in the brain between capsaicin and psychostimulants.
We don’t know about you, but we’re safety conscious. Whenever we’re about to get pepper-sprayed, from now on we’re yelling, “I’m on cocaine! I’m on cocaine!”
