Nitrous, one of the oldest mind-altering drugs, is back

The sweet, odorless gas technically called nitrous oxide has many names: laughing gas, galaxy gas, hippy crack, whippets, even “the atmosphere of heaven.” Nitrous itself has just as many common uses as it does names. Doctors use it as a mild anesthetic, sending patients off into brief and largely pain-free dissociative euphorias before having a tooth pulled or dislocated finger yanked straight. Inhaling nitrous gives a loopy, giddy sort of high that can last up to five minutes. As a pressurized gas, nitrous also powers rockets, race cars, and whipped cream dispensers. The gas is both legal and widely available. It comes in small pressurized canisters intended for kitchen use; large tanks for heavier applications, like medicine or car engines; or even as the gas that shoots out of whipped cream canisters when there’s no cream left (hence: “whippets”). Thanks to being both accessible and cheap, nitrous has been used as a recreational drug for decades, from Grateful Dead concerts in the ’60s to raves in the ’90s. Lockdowns during the Covid pandemic seem to have set off a new wave of recreational nitrous use. Today, “People on Nitrous Gas” has its own TikTok discovery tab, with videos racking up millions of views. Celebrities are putting the risks of abuse on display, from Kanye West and SZA, to Steve-O of the stunt show Jackass fame. The Mormon mothers and social media influencers of “MomTok,” whose faith shuns any drug use, recently said that part of the draw of all the Botox they’ve gotten is getting the nitrous first. “It’s a party,” one said. Inhaling nitrous is considered relatively safe for people who don’t use it often and don’t take too much. But there are definitely risks, and more so in recreational contexts. As recreational use rises, particularly among teenagers, those risks are gaining more attention. The primary one is vitamin B12 deficiency. Nitrous inactivates B12 in the body, which coupled with long-term use can lead to nerve damage across the brain and spine. Without intervention, that can develop into paralysis or brain damage. There’s currently no consensus as to whether nitrous should be labeled an addictive substance. While it doesn’t seem to build the same physical dependency as opioids, it does still carry the risk of habit formation in some cases. And while nitrous doesn’t have a known fatal dose, deaths from use have been known to occur, usually from accidents that can happen while high on nitrous or from asphyxiation. Across the UK, where statistics on nitrous are more detailed, there were just 56 deaths attributed to nitrous between 2001 and 2020, including both recreational and medical settings. (To put that in some perspective, there were nearly 10,000 deaths in the UK attributed to alcohol in 2021 alone.) But while the rise in using recreational nitrous for its brief highs is prompting new concerns, the drug is actually one of the oldest stories in the Western history of mind-altering substance use. Through the centuries of up-and-down nitrous use across the US and UK, you find a rich, at times hilarious, trail left by this so-called atmosphere of heaven. Theaters across the US in the early 1800s filled with members of the public, watching volunteers inhale nitrous on stage and provide a delirious form of entertainment for the crowds. Traveling caravans brought nitrous shows on the road. Poets celebrated a new form of pleasure, while philosophers tried nitrous in Harvard laboratories, frantically scribbling down rushes of insight. [Image: An 1840 engraving of a man dancing after inhaling nitrous oxide. https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/2_11557a.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] The history of nitrous use is a history of shifting cultural attitudes about the mind. More specifically, about the value — or rejection — of chemically altered states of consciousness. Today, as the gradual return of legal access to psychedelics is sparking renewed conversation around the potential benefits, and harms, of mind-altering drugs, seeing the many different iterations of nitrous use across history can help us think more expansively about what, if anything, the strange experiences of nitrous mean and what the future of recreational nitrous might look like. “A new pleasure for which language has no name” In late 18th-century industrial Britain, the air was foul. Coal smoke and the odor of feces were abundant. Respiratory diseases were rampant, like tuberculosis, which had come to be known as “the robber of youth.” The deadly air inspired the founding of the Pneumatic Institution in 1799, a medical facility in Bristol intended to study whether gasses could be used as medicines, too. It was there that the first experiments with nitrous began in earnest. The chemist Joseph Priestley discovered nitrous oxide in 1772, but dismissed it as toxic. Humphry Davy, a young lab assistant at the Pneumatic Institution, had a hunch that Priestley’s discovery had been confused with a chemically similar but highly irritating compound: nitric oxide. In April, Davy repeated Priestley’s experiment, and wrote to a friend afterward that he had “made a discovery which proves how necessary it is to repeat experiments,” prefiguring the role of replication in science today. Nitrous oxide, when purely synthesized, was perfectly breathable. Davy then set out to breathe as much as he possibly could. He sealed himself inside a box that was designed to boost the inhalation of gasses. He sat for over an hour while a steady flow of nitrous oxide filled the chamber. When he stepped out, he grabbed a giant silk air-bag full of more nitrous and huffed that too, just for good measure. Then, his mind peeled away from his body, and he “lost touch with all external things,” entering a strange, revelatory world of flashing insights. That summer, Davy invited dozens of curious writers, physicians, and philosophers to visit the Pneumatic Institute in the late evenings after normal operations had ceased. They all huffed nitrous, experimenting with entirely new regions of the mind. According to historian Mike Jay, author of Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind, nitrous gave Western scientists one of the first chemical means of reliably accessing mystical states of consciousness. Against the banality of our ordinary experience, nitrous delivered a shocking contrast, a state of mind full of unfamiliar pleasures that often carried a sense of insight into the nature of the cosmos. The poet Robert Southey, after his first hit of nitrous, wrote to his brother that “Davy has actually invented a new pleasure for which language has no name.” [Image: Colored etching by Robert Seymour of his evening with a group of poets composing verses while on nitrous oxide in 1829. https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/Gas-living-room-color-1.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] Within a year, however, most who had come to try nitrous lost interest. Its pleasures were new and exciting, but rarely stuck with users once they returned to sobriety after a few minutes. Others who tried the gas just ended up with an upset stomach and the giggles. Davy, who would go on to become president of the Royal Society, stayed with his experiments, eventually producing a hefty book on the chemistry and philosophy of nitrous. He predicted that since nitrous temporarily extinguished pain, it could be useful during surgeries. No form of anesthesia existed yet, so surgeries were very painful, and very dangerous. But the idea failed to gain momentum. Instead, nitrous became something else: entertainment. How nitrous became entertainment, and then medicine Though the early enthusiasm for nitrous fizzled, it was easy enough to produce that, as word got out, chemists learned they could make it in their home laboratories. This turned nitrous into something of a party fixture. “Maybe it will become the custom for us to inhale laughing gas at the end of a dinner party, instead of drinking champagne,” a young German chemist speculated in 1826, after participating in a garden party where guests enjoyed nitrous under the afternoon sun. Public nitrous shows began taking place as early as an 1814 lecture series in Philadelphia. First, a doctor gave a discourse on the effects of nitrous to the assembled crowd. Then, a series of young men volunteered to inhale balloons of nitrous onstage, putting on a raucous spectacle. While Davy and his friends had been interested in the mental side of what being on nitrous felt like, these public shows put a spotlight on the uninhibited bodies that the chemical set loose. After inhaling the gas, volunteers would clumsily dance, fight, sing, or even strike up the occasional fencing match. Sometimes, the first row of a theater was kept empty to protect onlookers from the mayhem. “On stage, the subjective experience was incidental,” writes Jay. “The moment of return to waking consciousness was not interrogated for mystical revelation, but held up for confused hilarity.” Soon, nitrous shows were taken on the road, carried by traveling carnivals to new, hooting crowds each night. Volunteers were charged around 25 cents per huff, bringing in good profit for those who’d invested in the necessary gas tanks, tubes, and breathing bags. One traveling nitrous show, put on by Samuel Colt (who would go on to invent the pioneering Colt firearm), dosed roughly 20,000 volunteers from Canada to Maryland. It was during a show in 1844 that the American dentist Horace Wells witnessed a teenager on nitrous slam into a wooden bench. The boy, Wells noticed, felt no pain, which led him to wonder whether he could give the gas to clients to numb the pain of having a tooth pulled. Wells first tried on himself, inhaling nitrous and having another dentist pull his own wisdom tooth. It was a great success: Wells felt no pain, and proclaimed “a new era in tooth pulling.” He successfully performed the procedure on a few of his patients, before convincing a surgeon at the prestigious Massachusetts General Hospital to let Wells administer the gas during an operation, doubling as a demonstration for a strictly medical audience. It didn’t go well. Nervous in front of a scrupulous crowd, Wells pulled away the nitrous balloon a little too quickly. During the operation, the patient appeared to groan in pain (though it was later deemed an involuntary and unconscious response). Onlookers nevertheless booed Wells out of the theater, and the embarrassment pushed him into a depression that culminated in suicide. But the demonstration inspired Wells’s former partner to try a similar procedure, only with a different substance: a solvent called ether. After a few successful experiments using ether as an anesthetic, another demonstration was arranged in the same theater where Wells’s had failed. This time, ether was successfully administered as a pain-vanquishing anesthetic, prompting one of the most significant medical breakthroughs of the century, as well as a revisitation of Wells’s work with nitrous. The hospital theater was renamed “The Ether Dome,” while anesthetic use of both ether and nitrous began to spread across the country. The next 150 years of nitrous The rise of anesthetics like nitrous in medicine was accompanied by a decline in their use as recreational drugs. Physicians began to think of nitrous-induced revelations as gibberish, closer to delirium than real insight. Too much interest in their short-lived pleasures, doctors began to write, could pose a public health risk. Recreational anesthetics like nitrous would “delight the animal sensations, while they destroy the moral sentiments; they introduce their victims to a fool’s paradise; they mock them with joys which end in sorrows.” Jay describes the mid-1800s arc of nitrous as a “shift away from subjectivity,” prefiguring the same trajectory across a variety of disciplines, including psychology. Through the middle of the 19th century, nitrous settled into dentistry while falling out of philosophy, with at least one major exception that ultimately proved the rule: the eccentric American philosopher Benjamin Blood. In 1860, during what he expected to be a very normal visit to the dentist, he awoke from a routine dose of nitrous with the vague sense that he’d glimpsed the essence of all philosophy, the “secret or problem of the world,” as he later wrote. Blood asked dentists and doctors why their gas had given him a spiritual epiphany. He learned two things. First, that “nearly every hospital and dentist office has its reminiscences of patients who, after a brief anesthesia, uttered confused fragments of some inarticulate import which always had to do with the mystery of life.” Across the country, patients returning from anesthesia had been asking their doctors something to the effect of, “What does it all mean, or amount to?” Second, the doctors and the dentists couldn’t care less. Blood received smiles and shrugs, but no explanations. So he spent 14 years reviving the tradition of nitrous self-experimentation, eventually publishing a pamphlet: The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy. It didn’t get particularly famous, but it did catch the attention of Harvard philosopher William James. Inspired by Blood’s curious writings, James followed Humphry Davy’s old protocol, heating a beaker of ammonium nitrate in the Harvard chemistry laboratory, capturing the escaping gas, and inhaling deeply with pen and paper in hand. His subsequent experience of “intense metaphysical illumination” informed the rest of his life’s work, where he would go on to become known, today, as the father of American psychology. Meanwhile, innovations in the delivery mechanisms for laughing gas were starting to ramp up its use in dentistry. George Poe, cousin of the poet Edgar Allen Poe, figured out how to manufacture nitrous in liquid form. This allowed for packaging and distributing it in easy-to-use canisters. By 1883, he was supplying 5,000 dentists with canned nitrous oxide across the country. Once nitrous came in a convenient package, people began finding all sorts of new uses for it. In 1914, American rocketeer Robert Goddard filed a patent suggesting it could work as a rocket propellant, where it’s still used today. [Image: Clubgoers at Studio 54 in New York enjoy a tank of nitrous oxide on the dance floor in 1977. https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/GettyImages-583937001.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] But the innovation that brought nitrous back into style as a contemporary recreational drug was a little more mundane: whipped cream canisters. It turned out that dispensing cream out of a nitrous gas cylinder delivers the perfectly fluffy whipped cream we can so easily buy in grocery stores today. These whipped cream canisters are also where the name “whippets” comes from, and how we’ve landed in the awkward situation of rising nitrous use among teenagers. Nitrous, today and tomorrow In the neighboring arena of psychedelic drugs, many advocates are pushing for wider accessibility to these mind-altering substances. With nitrous, that accessibility is already here, and now, attracting strong criticism. The UK recently reinstated a shade of prohibition, making possession of nitrous oxide for “unlawful use” illegal. You can still use it to dispense whipped cream and other culinary delights, but if you’re just interested in a giggly high, or even seeing whether it might reveal, as Blood thought, the world’s philosophical secret, that’s unlawful. But prohibition inevitably pushes drug use underground, where it’s guaranteed to be riskier and less well-informed than legal, regulated, and educated use. And with a substance like nitrous that has relatively few risks when used responsibly and occasionally, there’s an opportunity to work on promoting more responsible forms of use through public education (such as awareness that the gas impairs the body’s ability to take in oxygen, so doing whippets in a tight, closed space is probably not as safe as in a backyard). Since nitrous-related substance abuse is such a small problem relative to opioids and alcohol, it hasn’t received all that much study. The past few years of data, however, have prompted a new conversation around whether nitrous should be considered addictive. It doesn’t seem to form a physical dependence, like opioids, and has no physical symptoms of withdrawal. But it does seem capable of forming a more psychological form of dependence (dissociative pleasure basically on tap does obviously pose some habit-forming risk), prompting concerns around how exactly to label it. Either way, ensuring support and harm reduction is available to those who need it may prove to be a challenge. But if we can’t figure out how to handle recreational use with nitrous, it’s difficult to imagine how we’d do it in a world where LSD and psilocybin mushrooms become widely available, too. [Image: Discarded canisters of nitrous oxide. https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/09/GettyImages-1276667241.jpg?quality=90&strip=all] More broadly, though, set against the long history of different approaches and interpretations of nitrous, our current situation isn’t all that new. Today’s social media spectacles of nitrous use are just digitized versions of the same nitrous shows from the 1800s. Back then, some people believed that wild behaviors while on nitrous revealed “the volatility of the democratic masses.” What might it say about our own cultural moment that recreational nitrous use is returning as a sort of performative delirium? As far as the philosophy of nitrous goes, I imagine curious experimenters today are working with different substances, like extended DMT. Maybe someone like Benjamin Blood will come along and make the case that we still have much to learn from nitrous. Maybe dentists will begin to read up on metaphysics and begin engaging with their woozy patients rather than dismissing their experiences. Or, maybe nothing much will happen with nitrous. The social media hype will die down as new drugs take its place, and it will sink back into relative obscurity, propelling rockets and numbing minor surgeries, inspiring the occasional dorm-room conversation about God and the nature of pleasure. At the very least, as its long history shows, nitrous will always remain capable of giving us a great story.