A funny story... but not really

About five years ago, I was going through a Mexican cooking phase, and I was feeling kind of cocky about my ability to handle spicy foods. Long story short, I ended up adding way too many habañero chili peppers to my fajita recipe (for the record, ANY number of habañeros is too many). The eating part was actually okay... maybe a little uncomfortable, but I had rice and chips and other stuff to absorb the oils.

Then I washed the dishes and sat out on the porch for nice post-meal glass of wine. At which point my hands exploded.

Now, I've had eczema all my life, so random itchy rashes aren't something unusual in my life. But this was by far the most skin-related pain I've ever been in. The super-strength, prescription-only hydrocortisone cream that knocks out my eczema flare-ups did nothing to touch this. Finally, out of desperation, I reasoned that since drinking milk helps with easing spicy-food mouth-burn, rubbing cream cheese all over my hands would cure this. Believe it or not, it worked.

I bring this up because, according to Scoville Unit scale, which officially ranks peppers by the amount of capsaicin they contain (capsaicin is the angry oil that you can apparently only neutralize with dairy products), habañero chilis have 100,000 to 350,000 Scoville Heat Units (SHUs). A jalapeño pepper has 3,500 to 8,000 SHUs.

Law enforcement-grade pepper spray? 500,000 to 2 million SHUs. Or, at minimum, five times the strength of the most physically painful thing I've ever been through, or maybe up to 20 times as painful, depending on the variety of spray.

In other words... anyone out there, say, going on national television to say that Occupy protestors at UC Davis are just big babies because pepper spray is "a food product, essentially," is either a) hopelessly partisan to the point that he/she can't acknowledge the basic humanity of people they disagree with politically, b) a blooming idiot, or c) both.

(Substitute "middle aged retirees as a Tea Party rally" for "college students at an Occupy protest" and see if you still think pepper-spraying a peaceful assembly is A-OK.)