Nitrous Nation

USE ONLY FOR TOOTHACHES –

Jan. 30, 2021 – There are “stories of pool parties, people filling inflatables in the pool with nitrous oxide, so you could be just floating on it and huffing on it,” said Mike Jay, the author of “The Atmosphere of Heaven,” a book about the origins of nitrous.

Decades later, a 2010 Village Voice article chronicled the Nitrous Mafia, a coalition of dealers who sold nitrous-filled balloons from gas tanks at raves and jam-band concerts, using violence to maintain their dominance. Concertgoers would consume so much nitrous they would pass out. (“I’ve watched so many young people crack their heads and faces open that I have personally stopped providing emergency first aid,” an emergency medical technician told The Village Voice.) Stephen Gilchrist Glover, the former “Jackass” star known as Steve-O, encountered the drug in 1994, while following the Grateful Dead on tour. “It was called hippie crack,” he said. He liked it. Later, he became addicted, he said.

At times he would use hundreds of canisters per day, he said. “In my active nitrous addiction, I would make every effort to inhale only nitrous, like, to the exclusion of even air,” he said. “To lose consciousness wasn’t failure — that was the goal.”

This is not an uncommon sentiment. Some users put plastic bags over their heads while inhaling, a practice linked to multipledeaths. (The Wall Street Journal reported that Mr. Hsieh, for one, used nitrous to deprive himself of oxygen, in order to “figure out what his body could live without.”)