Is this the first eco-weapon? Something a vegan with an attitude might consider his/her first choice of weaponry?

Saving the world from pollution, one chili at a time!

This may technically violate the Geneva Convention's ban on chemical weapons, but if it's non-lethal and has no lasting harmful effects, it's a heck of a lot better than butchering Iranian protesters with axes. More humane, less messy.

Guys, pepper spray and guns firing de facto pepper spray grenade rounds are used all over the world in law enforcement. This just seems to be simply an adaptation of that technology using a particularly potent and homegrown concentration of capsaicin. Many militaries and "internal defense/security" agencies are developing non-lethal weapons and deterrents precisely for civilian crowd control, not (technically Geneva convention violating) battlefield use. (c.f. the "pain rays" the U.S. army and air force are developing.)

Let's be careful using the term "non-lethal." Maybe it's a more sensitive subject to me, since it happened in a crowd in which I was present, but you may remember the incident in 2004 when a student was killed outside of Fenway Park when the Red Sox won the Penant. Nobody needs to have any kind of illusions about something being safe to fire at another person.

Non-lethal weapons are the wave of the future. If we are to evolve past our primal instinct to kill each other this is one way to help. Any true intellectual will ask themselves "is it really necessary to kill an opponent if we can merely immobilize them long enough to take away their means of offense". Of course it would be a little more complicated than that, but not any more so than inventing new arrays of complex lethal-weapons. It is only our ignorant and primitive ways that "justify" the need to kill in order to defend ourselves, which is surely related closely to our egocentric desire to seek vengeance when the moment arises.

Of course the only thing more evolved than using non-lethal weapons is not using ANY weapons.... it worked for Gandhi and Martin Luther King..... and remember they WON their "war"!

roshinobi, good point, but to address your sensitivities, even "life saving" technologies can be utterly lethal if used inappropriately by untrained users, as was the case with the Boston police officer who fired the pepper gun at the woman. It's the equivalent of a firefighter trying to extract someone from a wreck with the jaws of life by using the vice grip to yank the victim out by the neck. When the Boston story broke, anyone with even a passing familiarity with the weapon knew the officer and his command was at fault there for completely misusing the pepper gun. In the real world, weapons are described as "non lethal" by their designed intent (i.e. rule number one when using the device is to never ever aim it directly at a person). When it comes down to it, anything is lethal if abused in the right circumstances.

That said, heavy exposure to extreme concentration of capsaicin can cause serious, sometimes permanent injuries, even death, which is why I see this effort at really making a home grown equivalent of existing chemical pepper sprays than it is an attempt to create something truly new.

QWERTY, yes, it's pretty to think a world without violence is possible.

Way to go!!