Last year at all of those protests,
I mean, we showed you countless
acts of police brutality and
needless violence,
both from the cops and
then also from counter protesters.
Against people who
are just fighting for the rights,
trying to push for a little bit
more justice in the country.
Now, some damage that was done with
those protesters it turned out was
a little bit less visible, or
a little bit harder to understand.
But new studies are showing that
the widespread use of tear gas and
things like it by police to
break up crowds, or
sometimes just to punish them.
There were many instances we showed
you where they would hem protesters
in so they couldn't leave, and
then they would tear gas them.
It wasn't to disperse them,
there was nowhere for them to go.
It was to punish them.
Well, it turns out that can have
effects especially on women.
So last summer in the midst of all
this, anecdotes started cropping up
online of protesters convinced that
regular exposure to the chemical
had disrupted their
menstrual cycles.
A preschool teacher told
Oregon Public Broadcasting that if
she inhaled a significant amount of
gas at night she'd get her period
the next morning.
Other Portland residents shared
stories of periods that lasted for
weeks and of unusual spotting.
Transgender men described sudden
periods that defied hormones that
had kept menstruation at bay for
months or years.
Nearly 900 people reported
something like this,
with symptoms including intense
cramping and increased bleeding,
headaches, nausea, diarrhea,
mental health concerns.
Well, now there's this study and
the results are available.
You go to The New York Times and
you can read that in-depth if you'd
like, but researchers talked
to a ton of people about their
exposure and what effects they had.
And one of the study author says,
even though we cannot say
anything scientifically definitive
about these chemical agents at
a causal relationship to
menstrual irregularities.
We could definitively say that in
our study,
most people who had menstrual
cycles or uterus, reported
menstrual irregularities after
reporting exposure to tear gas.
So this is not definitive,
they're the first to say that.
But Yasmin, it does appear that
tear gas does have not only
the obvious negative effects that
we know, but specifically on women,
some horrendous ones that haven't
been talked about, really at all.
>> Yeah, I mean, who knows what all
these things are doing to us?
I mean, it's chemical warfare and
they're inflicting it on their own
people, their own populations,
not just in the United States but
all over,
all protests around the world.
Every time you look into it,
someone there is getting
tear gassed, and they act like
these really harsh chemicals,
all they do is make you cry and
they just make your eyes kind of
itchy and watery, they're harmless.
Impossible, there's no way.
And I guess I'm extra-sensitive
about this topic, too, because at
least in Houston, it feels like
more recently than before.
There's just chemicals in
the air and in our water, and
they will kind of let us know,
and they're, yeah, it's fine now.
Now you can go outside again,
like that's happened so many times
in the last couple of months.
And it's like,
what are they doing to us?
They're killing us and we don't
even know what the effects are.
And with the tear gas thing, these
are people who are protesting which
is their constitutional right to do
so, at least in the United States.
I can't speak for
every country, but
protesting is a thing that people
should be able to do, especially if
they're doing it peacefully,
which a lot of times they are, and
they still get tear gassed for it.
It reminds me of the umbrella
protests in Hong Kong,
I think that was 2019.
And everybody they had umbrellas,
and that was their symbol for
peace, because they say we're not
here to fight but we have umbrellas
to protect us from the tear gas
that you're trying to gas us with.
>> Yeah.
>> And I thought that was
such a powerful symbol, and pretty
clever on their part as well.
>> Yeah.
And by the way,
you're totally right.
In this case, I'm very glad that
people are questioning the police
in a lot of ways that they haven't
for a long time, or
at least that there haven't been
a sort of sustained public movement
that's getting press coverage.
But one part of that should be
really questioning some of their
tactics when it comes to equipment.
We have this assumption that if
something's been used for
a long time, I guess it's safe.
Well, they point out in this study
that a lot of this stuff about tear
gas, these are old studies that
the police did themselves over half
a century ago.
And I'm sure they're being
super rigorous.
But yeah, things like tear gas as
well as other chemical irritants,
and tear gas is just one of them.
The widespread use of flash bangs,
the less lethal stun guns and
things like that, all of
this has an effect on the body, and
needs to be acknowledged.
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