Battlefield between the ears

摘要

On an evening in October 2002, a group of armed Chechen separatists overran a Moscow theatre, taking the audience hostage and rigging the building with explosives. After a short stand-off, Russian special forces flooded the building with an aerosol based on the potent synthetic opioid fentanyl and then stormed it. The narcotic was effective in incapacitating the hostage-takers, many of whom were executed on the spot. In the ensuing chaos, however, 117 hostages also died from fentanyl poisoning. They were victims not only of terrorism but also of poor planning: if the opioid antagonist naloxone had been available to rescuers, many of these deaths could have been avoided.