What drug and sensory weapons can be used instead of ballistic weapons?

Question

I am working on a story where ballistic weapons are completely banned across the entire planet in favor of smell, sound, and drug-weapons.

For example, the police are equipped with somnambulizers and hilaritazers, depending on the situation... somnambulizers make someone sleep instantly, and hilaritazers have a LSD related substance, which makes people laugh and forget where they are.

A huge metropolis in Texas has become rebellious and has 3D printed guns and ballistic weapons and has walled off the city, and the big brother has to make everyone flee from the city safely, using only smell, sound, and drug based weapons, so they can attend citizen-responsibility classes to read the little red book.

What kinds of sensory and drug based tactics can the government use, from rotten fish, tranquilizers, LSD, fluffy toys that sing, to make the city completely docile and make people flee from it, without killing anybody?

Answer 1

What comes into my mind at first reading is Stanislav Lems Futurological Congress: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Futurological_Congress

Goverment deploys some hypnotic drug, that makes people believe, they live in a better world. Police force in your world might use something similar, but the drug creates a scarry scenario in the mind of the people. Something that reacts on external triggers, stroboscope lights for example.

Drugged people react to the lights in the city, leaving them only a route to escape from the lights. That way, everybody flees, but nobody gets hurt or killed, except from the first panicking (but there's always a 10 percent loss in everything... )

Answer 2

For the purposes that you need to achieve, giving troops weapons isn't the most effective way to go about doing it.

Instead, you should be attacking the city itself. Since it's been walled off, you can treat it as a siege situation - Start by blocking off all their sewage pipes so that the smell becomes unbearable over time, attack any convoys delivering supplies so that the citizens have to leave the city to get food (I think you'll find that using the sense of Hunger as a strategy is very effective).

Alternatively, you can carpet spray the entire area with sleeping drugs in liquid form on a foggy/cloudy night via stealth plane and allow the "drugged rain" to seep into everything, putting everyone to sleep and allowing the government to easily remove the citizens.

Answer 3

With the help of some nanotechnology, you could inject tiny computers into people with darts that could stimulate senses through electric impulses could be controlled by the police. They could basically cause them to hallucinate rampaging monsters in the city, remotely manipulate their muscles, make some voice in their head telling them to evacuate, or cause severe paint to them, or any other use of this.