Diablo Loco SHU Rating

[aprioristic]

How did you come to the 500K SHU rating? Someone posted stuff about capsaicin being toxic, but they are looking at studies where rats were injected with pure capsaicin. Their study shows the intravenous LD50 at 0.40 mg/kg and the same for nicotine as 0.30 mg/kg -- So, it seems pretty silly to say that a vendor adding a little capsaicin for throat hit is dosing you with anywhere near these levels.

1g of pure capsaicin is apparently 16 million SHU, so your rating equates to 1/32 of a gram or 31.25 mg. Is that per bottle? I'm assuming you have some idea roughly what % of the mix is actually capsaicin and not other chemicals, besides the diluent. (something like 70% I think)

The vendor in question (PureVapes) sells 15ml bottles and gives options for 0-3 "spoons" of sweet, cool, hot, etc. If I assume what seems reasonably the worst he might add, that is 3 spoons = 3 drops of Loco. I'm going to ask him, but more than that seems it would be unpleasant..

So given 20 drop = ml and my guess at Loco being ~3mg/ml of pure capsaicin, that is 0.15mg into a 15ml solution, resulting in 0.01 mg/ml of capsaicin. A 50 kg (110lb) person would need to take 15mg directly into their bloodstream to meet the rat LD50. From the reviews I've seen of Loco, people can hardly vape more than 2 pulls, let alone half a bottle of the concentrate.

So there's a lot more to the medicine of all this which I don't quite understand, but it seems pretty silly to me, just wanted your opinion.

 

[Nick O'Teen]

I calculated the SHU on the basis of the known capsaicin content (just under 3%,) so yes, you'd have to put a lot of it directly into your bloodstream to run any risk (orders of magnitude larger than even the most dedicated of masochists could possibly self-administer via inhalation or ingestion!)
Various police forces around the world have determined that it's "safe" to spray comparatively large quantities into people's faces, though there have been some deaths as a result of positional asphyxia (it's very easy to choke to death when you're incapacitated by pain, hand-cuffed, and thrown face down in the back of a police van.)

SHU ratings are calculated qualitatively, rather than quantatively, ie: on the basis of the maximum attainable dilution that still produces detectable heat in bland food, so a 10ml bottle of 500,000 SHU Diablo Loco would produce detectable heat in up to 5,000,000ml (approximately 5 tonnes!) of bland food. Your maths is correct in extrapolating the quantity of capsaicin in the product, but of course, if other capsaicinoids or eg: resiniferatoxin had been used, the quantities would be skewed because of the different Scoville ratings of these other compounds