Will a spate of law-suits reduce harm from nitrous oxide?
Plus other news and links
Sam Bramman, an Australian man in his early 20s, first tried nitrous oxide in early 2023. Ten months later he was hospitalized with nitrous addiction and substance-induced psychosis.
He says:
I first tried the bulbs at a party. I smacked my head on a wall behind me when I fell over but couldn’t feel any pain. Over the next few months, I would try ‘nangs’ (the Australian term for nitrous cartridges) at parties, not thinking about them much. Then I found out ‘nangs’ are sold in pretty much every tobacconist near me. I became more interested in doing them regularly.
Nitrous oxide is legally available around the world as a gas for making whipped cream. It’s also used as an anaesthetic in some dentists. It’s a $1.7 billion industry worldwide. It’s not clear how much of that industry is accounted for by recreational use as a party drug, but some US nitrous retailers say that up to three quarters of their sales goes to smoke shops, where nitrous is sold in flavoured cartridges clearly marketed at recreational inhalant use, with names like Galaxy Gas, Baking Bad, Cosmic Gas and Cloud 9ine. You can buy tanks and cartridges of nitrous oxide on Amazon, at Walmart, and at smoke shops across the US and other countries.
Nitrous oxide is the third most popular recreational drug in the UK, after cannabis and cocaine. The Global Drug Survey, a voluntary survey of more than 32 000 participants in 22 countries, found that 22.5% of respondents had used nitrous oxide in their lifetime in 2021, up from 10% in 2015.
Harms are rising alongside usage. In Michigan, annual poison center exposures, emergency department visits, and emergency medical responses related to nitrous oxide misuse were four to five times higher in 2023 compared to 2019, according to the CDC.
US annual deaths from nitrous oxide poisoning rose almost 600% between 2010 and 2023, according to a 2025 JAMA Network Open study on nitrous-related mortalities in the US . Of the 1,240 reported deaths during that 13-year period, 74% occurred in the last seven years. 23 users of nitrous oxide died from the drug in 2010, compared to 156 in the year 2023.
‘I think we are currently at the bottom of a hill,’ said co-lead author Professor Rachel Hoopsick of the University of Illinois. “Without any type of regulatory intervention, deaths and poisonings from nitrous oxide will increase at an accelerating rate and become a tremendous public health issue. Now is a critical window of time to intervene. We don’t want to wait until we’re at the top of the mountain, which is what we did with opioids.’
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A Lancet 2025 study tracked the growing number of studies looking into harm from nitrous use. There are various harms that can occur from recreational nitrous use, from cold burns to asphyxiation, to passing out and banging your head, to crashing your car while driving under the influence, to nitrous addiction, all the way to substance-induced psychosis. One of the worst impacts can be neurological - excessive nitrous use can damage the brain and lead to permanent problems walking. Go to the Reddit group ‘nitrous recovery’ and you can read many stories of people with permanent neurological damage from nitrous addiction.
Sam says his use of nitrous turned quickly into an addiction:
I started off getting the ten-packs for AUS$10, and they would last me about an hour. The only real side effect I was seeing was the cracker device used to open the bulbs was freezing parts of my hand. A few months after that I was pretty deep in the nitrous addiction, doing about 50 bulbs a day. I needed them when I woke up and before I slept, the momentary high just urged me to keep doing them.
Why does he think he developed a dependency so quickly?
I did not have any prior mental health issues. I think I was susceptible to nitrous addiction because of how damn easy it was to purchase. and I didnt know the damaging effects, so I thought it was a short “safe high”. I had a pretty normal life but got addicted to how the nitrous made me feel, not because of any trauma or situation I was in, but because it felt good to use.
He then experienced substance-induced psychosis in October 2023, when driving the 1000km from Sydney to Queensland.
I was doing balloons while driving on the highway. I was experiencing intrusive thoughts and hallucinations. Eventually my car ran out of fuel. That’s when the psychosis really took off - I was walking 40km a day barefoot in the streets of Queensland. The police finally stopped me, walking with one sock on, a black dirty foot, pants held up with a phone charger as a belt, and a washing basket with all my belongings in it. I was sent involuntarily to a pysch ward where I was sedated heavily for about four weeks. After that I was put on antipsychotic meds, which made me bed-ridden for about a year until the doctors slowly weened me off the meds.
Sam is doing better now:
I am fully recovered. I have no desire for drugs. I have a full time job, a beautiful girlfriend. I run six times a week and go to the gym three times a week, training for a 350km run in a three-night period to help raise awareness and call for stricter laws against nitrous oxide. I want only people with licenses to be able to purchase nitrous, online or offline, and tobacconists not allowed to sell it any more.
What can be done to reduce nitrous-related harms?
Different countries are pursuing various approaches to try and reduce the public health risks from nitrous use. The UK made possession for recreational use illegal in 2023, which seems to have led to a decline in the use of nitrous in public places, but it’s not clear if it’s led to a decline in use in private.
In the US, the FDA issued a rather tame warning about inhaling nitrous, but the more significant response has been from civil law suits. In 2023, one manufacturer of nitrous oxide cartridges - United Brands - filed for bankruptcy after being found liable in a $750-million settlement, after it was sued by the family of a woman killed by a teenager who was driving while high on nitrous. The law-suit argued that United Brands, which sold 75% of its product to smoke shops, must have known its products were being used for recreational purposes and would cause harm.
After the paywall, more lawsuits against nitrous retailers. Plus other stories - a rare interview with MKUltra mastermind Sidney Gottlieb; ChatGPT gives fatal drug advice; Republican backlash to Trump’s rescheduling of cannabis; and - after Maduro’s incredible capture - what next for Trump’s mobster imperialism? Plus, is the Telepathy Tapes a psy-op? (Probably not but let’s hear the guy out!)
