You've seen these images.
Huge chemical clouds covering crowds of demonstrators.
Riot police firing off rounds and rounds of tear gas canisters, especially
in places like Hong Kong, where riot police have been violently clashing
with pro-democracy protesters since June 2019.
And they're using a lot of tear gas.
In fact, more than 10,000 canisters of tear gas have been fired off since
protests started in June 2019.
It's so much tear gas that health officials are warning of its effects,
especially as 88% of Hong Kong's population has been exposed to these
chemicals and 7.4
million people live there.
The Geneva Protocol of 1925 banned the use of tear gas during wartime
along with other chemical weapons.
But tear gas can be used in riot control situations.
If I created a map for you, of all the places where tear gas is used
today, the entire map would ding.
It's been used in Chile, France, Egypt and here in the United States, like
on the U.S.-Mexico border.
First of all, the tear gas is a very minor form of the tear gas itself.
It's very safe. And during the Ferguson, Missouri, protests in 2014, when
people took to the streets to protest the fatal police shooting of Michael
Brown, an 18-year-old unarmed black man.
But its use states far back in U.S.
history. Tear gas was used on what is remembered as Bloody Sunday on March
7th, 1965.
That's when state and local police attacked hundreds of civil rights
protesters marching from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
However, tear gas was deployed by U.S.
police forces many times in the decades before the events of Selma.
And on top of that, tear gas is only one of the many non-lethal weapons
that make up the growing industry.
There's also rubber bullets, water cannons, lasers, sticky foam.
All of this makes non-lethal weapons, a multi-billion dollar a year
industry. And with unrest around the globe intensifying, that industry is
expected to surge by a lot.
In 2016, the non-lethal weapons market was estimated at $6.32
billion. But by 2023, this industry could make nearly $12 billion in
revenue. In the last 10 years, tear gas and other crowd-control weapons
have become a lot more popular.
So, where does all this teargas come from?
It turns out a lot of that manufacturing is happening on U.S.
soil. So tear gas isn't really
a gas at all. It's more like a vapor, full of fine chemical dust.
It's actually a powder inside the canister.
And then when it explodes, it aerosolizes into the air.
Tear gas doesn't just cause eyes to water.
It causes a burning sensation, difficulty breathing, skin irritation and
chest pain. It's so painful you want to keep your eyes closed.
It makes people feel like they can't breathe, that they're suffocating.
Sometimes it can get into your mouth and through your stomach and causes
vomiting and things like that as well if you inhale a lot of it.
But 90% of the time, it's probably really just pain to the skin, the eyes,
the nose and the respiratory system.
As for what exactly is inside a canister of tear gas, that's harder to
answer. There is no regulation of how this weapon is manufactured or sold.
And so no one's required to produce this data or to inform the public
about even what chemical is there.
Manufacturers aren't saying, oh, we are putting this concentration of tear
gas, this many milligrams into a canister of this size.
They do not share that information.
Early forms of tear gas were first used at the end of the First World War.
The exact details of who fired the first shot of tear gas remains up for
debate. But most historians say the French fired tear gas grenades into
German trenches in August 1914 during the Battle of the Frontiers.
There was this idea that all kind of biological and chemical weapons after
these sort of atrocities of the First World War, that we should not be
using chemical, biological weapons as an offensive force.
There was a very strong push by most countries to have a ban on chemical
and biological weapons.
As this got debated and nuance, there was often the U.S.
and a few other countries often wanted this kind of exception for tear
gas. They wanted it to not be classified in the same way as these other
kinds of gases.
So, various international treaties, like the Geneva Protocol of 1925,
allowed countries to still manufacture tear gas.
World powers like Germany, France, Russia, Italy, the United Kingdom and
the United States wanted to keep the chemical warfare infrastructure after
investing tons of money in its development during World War One.
So there was a very entrepreneurial general named Amos Fries who ended up
becoming the head of the chemical warfare service in the United States,
and he really went on a mission to turn a number of different chemicals
into what was called from wartime to peacetime uses, and one of these was
what we now consider to be tear gas.
General Amos began what we know now as a PR campaign to showcase tear gas
as a humane alternative to bullets in the 1920s.
He kind of allied himself with lawyers and publicists in order to create a
public relations campaign to convince people that tear gas was the thing
that law enforcement and security officials needed.
In a special kit available for immediate use is a complete assortment of
gas munitions, including projectiles and grenades.
Tear gas was marketed as a near harmless alternative to lethal force.
The gas bomb is tossed in the window. He missed the window, but he still
tosses it in.
And as that message circulated newspapers in the U.S.,
more and more police forces wanted the product.
The pictures speak for themselves.
There becomes this kind of hey, over in Philadelphia, they're using it.
Or, like down in D.C.
they're using it. You guys should be too.
There becomes this way of everybody needing to get in on this new
technology that was going to work for law enforcement, for peace-keeping.
The commercialization of tear gas kickstarted with two of the first major
players, Federal Laboratories Inc.
in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the Lake Erie Chemical Company in
Cleveland, Ohio. Since then, the market has expanded and tear gas has
become the most widely used non-lethal weapon.
There are different kinds of tear gas.
But the most widely used form is CS.
And today, the United States is the biggest producer of CS tear gas.
Tear gas is mainly deployed in three different ways by grenade, by spray,
like aerosol or water cannon, or by projectile, like a cartridge launched
by a riot gun, which is the most common way it's used.
Out of all the non-lethal weapons used for crowd-control, tear gas is the
biggest money maker by far and a single canister sells for around $20.
Tear gas is seen more as a go-to heaven because one little canister
affects a large area people and it is less likely to cause any lasting
harm than other forms of weapon.
These chemical non-lethal weapons are expected to maintain that
popularity. As for who's making the most money off tear gas, the U.S.
is the largest developer, operator and exporter of non-lethal weapons.
U.S. companies just sort of dominate the market because it has greater
reach, because it has multiple companies.
But it's not necessarily that the U.S.
companies like much, much bigger.
Two of those big companies are in Pennsylvania.
According to Feigenbaum, the biggest company is Combined Systems Inc.
in Jamestown, Pennsylvania.
The other largest U.S.
manufacturer in Pennsylvania is NonLethal Technologies in Homer City.
And then there's Safariland in Jacksonville, Florida.
These three companies did not respond to CNBC repeated requests for
comment. When it comes to exporting and importing tear gas, it gets a
little complicated. So, the reason that you can't get much information
about tear gas being exported around the world is because it's not
considered military equipment.
You know, there are federal contracts that show that certain equipment is
sold to certain places.
But because tear gas is kind of operating at a level below that, it's not
being sold government-to-government, it's being sold privately from
corporations to law enforcement agencies.
Tear gas trade is largely unregulated by international standards.
The U.S. Department of Commerce regulates its trade of non-lethal weapons
through export licenses.
For example, U.S.
exports of tear gas and other law enforcement equipment to Hong Kong
requires a license.
The Commerce Department is also responsible for enforcing those licenses,
so U.S.-made tear gas cannot be shipped abroad without government
approval. However, it's not always that simple.
There's also buying that doesn't happen directly.
If a distributor has bought from Combined Systems Inc.
and then that distributor could distribute that product and that product
could then show up somewhere, it doesn't necessarily mean that Combined
Systems Inc. said yes, you can ship that product to this place.
So, because there 's not any kind of international regulation or standard
or trade oversight, we don't really know just because a weapon is in a
place necessarily how it got there.
Because of this, some activists have taken the backtracking the trade
process by taking photos of the used tear gas canisters lying on the
ground during a protest.
Those photos are shared over social media and have gotten a lot of
attention during recent protests and unrest around the world.
For example, months of protests rocked the Whitney Museum of American Art
in New York City as people learned that tear gas made by Florida-based
Safariland was reportedly used on migrants on the U.S.
border. And the CEO of Safariland, Warren Kanders, served on the board of
the museum as the vice chairman.
At least until July 2019, when he ultimately stepped down from the role
because of his connections to the tear gas manufacturer.
Amid the protests, part of the Whitney's biennial exhibit was a project
called Triplechaser, which is named after a tear gas canister that breaks
into three parts. We want to know where exactly this tear gas has gone.
We want to find ways to make that process more efficient.
Forensic Architecture developed a machine learning technology to track
tear gas canisters from protest sites back to the companies that made
them. We don't know where this tear gas has been sold until it's been
used. At the very bottom, at the kind of grassroots, is one image held
like this often to a camera by an activist.
I was able to find maybe a hundred, 150 photos, of the triplechaser
grenade online. That's not enough to train a classifier to then be
speculative. So, what we have to do is build synthetic training sets,
which we can then use to teach the classifier what's a triplechaser and
what isn't. Once you've done that, once you have the photos that either
your artificial intelligence or your human intelligence is bringing into
the office, connect back to a company.
Mapping tear gas canisters this way has showcased how some trade
relationships work between different countries.
Traditionally, manufacturers in France, Germany, Israel, the United
Kingdom and the United States have supplied the majority of the world's
crowd-control weapons.
More and more companies have sprung up all over the globe in recent years.
As of 2018, more than 50 countries had companies that produce
crowd-control weapons.
One big issue, many of the countries were non-lethal production has
expanded into have very weak export control systems and a lot of these
products come with little or no transparency at all.
This means places with poor human rights records can easily obtain
non-lethal weapons where they could be misused.
Right now, the Asia-Pacific region is home to the fastest growing market
for non-lethal weapons, including India, China, Australia and South Korea.
One of the biggest Chinese manufacturers is state owned, Norinco.
There's question about whether their safety protocols and their standards
are the same as the more Western and Latin American product, which are a
bit more regulated. This is of what's happening in Hong Kong is a lot of
the European and the U.S.
companies have pulled out or paused shipments.
China is coming in and filling those shipments.
The number of Chinese companies developing these weapons has grown from 28
in 2003 to more than 140 in 2014.
Brazil and the United Kingdom also have giant manufacturers of their own.
The newest player on the scene is Condor Non-lethal Technologies.
They are a Brazilian company, and so now they do a lot of the distribution
to Latin America.
Brazil certainly uses lots of tear gas.
As the tear gas industry goes global and crosses international borders,
that makes it harder to regulate.
Here's the thing that's interesting about the riot control business,
unlike how we normally think about the arms trade, which is big weapons,
big numbers.
The trade in riot control weapons, the amount of money we're talking about
is much, much smaller.
As the demand for non-lethal weapons has grown, so has the call for more
restraint and regulation.
But it's unclear where exactly those mandates will come from.
We also see more of these weapons being used in increasingly violent ways.
So there are deaths from the actual tear gas itself, mostly when it's used
excessively. But, the real significant number of deaths that we see these
days is direct trauma from the canisters, especially if they hit the head
or the neck or the delicate bones of the face.
That's like throwing like a heavy can of Coke out of a gun at somebody's
face. That will break bones and they will kill people.
Currently, there are several global conventions and agencies that attempt
to oversee the use of tear gas and other non-lethal weapons.
The Alliance for Torture-Free Trade, launched in 2017 with more than 60
countries from all over the world signed on to it.
It aims to prevent, restrict and end trade in goods intended for the use
of torture or capital punishment.
The United Nations also has guidance on when and how these weapons should
be used in its code of conduct for law enforcement officials and the
U.N.'s basic principles on the use of force and firearms by law
enforcement officials.
There's specific guidelines on when you can even use any force.
You can't even think about tear gas unless there is a need for use of
force, and when that force is used, it needs to be proportionate, it needs
to be limited and it needs to be controlled.
There's also the Chemical Weapons Convention, which was signed in 1993.
The convention bans countries from developing or acquiring chemical
weapons. Under the convention, riot control agents like tear gas cannot be
used as a method of warfare, but they can be used for domestic riot
control purposes.
The manufacturers themselves also offer guidelines as to how the product
should be used. That's also what allows the companies to not have
liability. So, when a company's product maims or kills somebody, they can
say well the officers didn't use it according to the correct protocol or
guidelines. Chemical irritants like tear gas remain the most use
crowd-control weapon.
But, new technologies could change that.
Among the newer technologies in non-lethal weapons are acoustic devices,
also known as sound cannons or sonic cannons.
They can emit painful, loud sounds and there are questions about their
safety in crowd control contexts.
My guess would be that we would not see more use of sound to replace gas
because it would come with that same problem.
It doesn't just affect the individual people, it affects anyone who is
around. The use of stun grenades and other devices meant to disorient
people is also on the rise.
These weapons create a loud explosion and/or a very bright flash of light.
But, poor regulation and almost no quality control has led to defective or
misfired stun grenades.
An entirely new and developing category is directed energy systems, also
known as the active denial or ADS.
These are electromagnetic heating devices that deliver very high frequency
millimeter wavelength electromagnetic rays that heat skin on contact and
cause a painful burning sensation.
However, they're still only in development and they haven't been used in
any real world protests yet.
As people around the world take to the streets in protest and riot police
attempt to take the streets back.
Crowd control weapons will continue to see demand and not just tear gas.
I think it's one of these, you know, philosophical, like, it always makes
me feel like I'm in moral philosophy 101 class where it's like, well,
would you rather I shot you in the face or I teargassed you and your
friends. Most people would choose the tear gas, but this is not a real
question. The real question should be, would you rather I listen to your
political demands and engaged you in deliberative Democratic debate or
would you rather I teargassed you.