"Where did the Nitrous go?" I asked finally.
"We got rid of it. Everyone working here were getting too much exposure."
Maybe they know something now that they didn't back then with, (FTA):
> after absorbing as much gas as humanly possible by enclosing himself in an airtight box filled with it for an hour and a quarter
In the first couple chapters, Pollan is trying to link some of the newer (1960s+) perceptions that we have about drug-induced mystical experiences, to those of earlier investigators. He goes back to the noted 1800s American philosopher William James, who wrote Varieties of Religious Experience.
Turns out James was an experimenter with Nitrous. As I remember Pollan's telling, James used a lot of nitrous, and preferred it strongly to some other substances available at the time (that maybe gave less well-controlled experiences?). According to Pollan, it was not a harmful thing. Wiki has a little more (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James#Philosophy_of_re...).
The Pollan book is quite worthwhile, BTW.
That’s why they put B12 in energy drinks.