Pepper spray: What it is and why it hurts (89.3 KPCC)

Pepper spray is literally made from peppers, but it?s name might make it seem more innocuous than it is, wrote Deborah Blum, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin, in Scientific American. It ranges between 2 and 5.3 million Scoville units, which are used to measure the intensity of a variety of peppers. The Habanero, for example, ranks significantly lower ? 200,000 to 350,000 units.