Tripping on Xenon Gas (2023)
tripsitter.substack.com
tripsitter.substack.com
Apparently, Xenon does this by acting as an antagonist of the N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor, a subtype of glutamate receptor, and also by enhancing the effect of ("potentiation of") gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA). Other drugs that act along the NMDA pathway are Ketamine and Memantine (an Alzheimer's drug). And other drugs that act along the GABA pathway are Benzodiazepines (e.g., Diazepam, Lorazepam-- i.e,. Valium). And apparently Nitrous Oxide (N2O) uses both mechanisms as well.
Apparently Krypton and Radon are slightly reactive as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_gas_compound
> It is caused by the anesthetic effect of certain gases at high partial pressure... Narcosis produces a state similar to drunkenness (alcohol intoxication), or nitrous oxide inhalation.
> Except for helium and probably neon, all gases that can be breathed have a narcotic effect, although widely varying in degree. The effect is consistently greater for gases with a higher lipid solubility, and although the mechanism of this phenomenon is still not fully clear, there is good evidence that the two properties are mechanistically related.
and apparently Gou Teng, used in traditional chinese medicine and for blood pressure control ("and" because TCM wasn't developed with blood pressure cuffs at hand).
I stopped after recording myself taking it. I was unconscious a lot longer than I remembered being, and even though I was probably never at risk of suffocating there were long periods where I didn’t see myself breathing. That was enough.
I regret the effects it may have had on my brain. It’s impossible to know the counterfactual “what if” and maybe binge drinking was worse.
Why don’t recreational nitrous users mix in some oxygen like medical users do?
Because they don't know better. It's not like we teach "safe consumption" in schools, and so most (particularly young) consumers of all possible kinds of drugs end up with cargo-culted consumption methods. Yes, Erowid etc. exist, but you need to know about that as well.
The correct thing to do would be to have "drug ed" similar to sex ed, but we see with the latter already how fierce political opposition to fact-based education can be, and with drugs it's going to be even worse.
Are many recreational drug users responsible about what they put in their bodies? Yes. The long lived in particular.
Do some recreational drug users find it a point of pride about how recklessly indifferent they can be about what they put in their bodies? Also yes.
There is also definitely a (small) subset of recreational drug users which actively seek out the worst possible things they can do to their bodies. The drug world version of [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugchasing].
I’m generally indifferent to recreational drug use, and have friends who are avidly in the first two categories. I’ve known people in the last, but found them too dangerous (and heartbreaking) to be around. Let’s not pretend they don’t exist.
If recreational nitrous was legal, and could be openly sold without the false pretense of being used to charge whipped cream - then I don’t see why not. You can get weed consumables in all different ratios and configurations.
https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp-rj.20...
That brings back memories. I remember one time falling off the bed I was sitting on, cracking my head on the concrete floor, and laying there thinking "this should really hurt, but it doesn't..........at all".
Breathing inert gasses is extremely dangerous. It is not like holding your breath: because the gas you inhale is free of oxygen, it actively pulls oxygen out of your blood. Instead of thinking about breath holding, think more like the USCSB videos where someone walks into a space with a nitrogen atmosphere and immediately drop unconscious, then someone goes in to save the first person (already knowing about the danger) and they both die. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2ItJe2Incs ).
When narcotic gasses are used for anesthetic purposes they're used with a gas manifold that mixes in pure oxygen to achieve a gas mix that won't kill the subject. Even this is easy to get wrong, and a wrong mix due to a flat tank or an incorrect setting can kill someone very quickly and quietly.
It's also not clear to me how psychologically safe it is, I've seen at least one clearly unhinged person on twitter going on about their xenon use... but I dunno if the drug use lead to they psych issues or the psych issues lead the the drug use. or if their issue was just related to inadvertent oxygen deprivation as a side effect of their xenon use. Studies of anesthetic use may not tell us much about recreational use since they're presumably not dosing people daily or multiple times daily for weeks at a time. -- it's not like you can easily purchase single doses, that bottle isn't going to use itself!
Suspended in this gas, one could be subjected to much higher acceleration without injury, up the point that density differences in the body become important.
Blacking out in dissociative euphoria still sounds like a feature, not a bug to me.
I personally witnessed 3 people vomiting, but I was all smiles the whole time. I am in small planes a lot, so kind of enjoy the bumps when it’s someone else’s job to fly now.
Personally I'd prefer to not be put in a coma in such an environment.
TFA talks about the effects coming on "within seconds" of inhalation, so it is clearly not just hypoxia which takes tens of seconds or minutes to manifest.
Our cells use single atoms, usually in the form of charged ions, on a regular basis and we would not survive without them
[1] https://pubs.asahq.org/anesthesiology/article/112/3/614/1084...
Filling the lungs with vacuum has the same effect. You have about 5 to 10 seconds before you're incapacitated:
Xenon has been the gas anesthetic of the future for a long time now. It does have one set of good qualities: it's not halogenated (like all common gas anesthetics), but it's nonflammable (there are very good anesthetic gases, like cyclopropane, that are extremely flammable and have thus been totally phased out of use), and because it's such a heavy atom, it essentially never leaves the atmosphere - no matter how much you use, you can always recapture it from the atmosphere.
It's not particularly cheap, though.
I suppose from the article that a dose of Xenon is $300 of gas, of which $50-$80 is not immediately reclaimed by a rebreather.
But it does cause chemical chsnges. Noble gasses can weakly interact. It does not need to form bonds to influence potential gradients, protein shapes, or other reactions.
Erowid has some other records of it. Sounds like nitrous but probably better. I wonder if humans evolved to react this way to certain gases or if its a coincidence.
There's a few of them on there https://www.erowid.org/experiences/subs/exp_Xenon.shtml
Uh, what?? No it doesn't.
I'm a hobbyist welder. When TIG welding you typically use 100% argon gas. I have a 60 cu ft cylinder hooked up to my welder right now; it costs $89 to refill at my local Airgas store.
That's approximately 5.2 cents per liter.
Here's a 40 cu ft tank of argon for sale on Amazon for $205: https://www.amazon.com/100-Argon-Welding-Tank-CGA/dp/B00I4Z6...
That's a new cylinder so most of the cost is the cylinder itself, but even then, that only comes out to 18.1 cents.
How on earth did TFA come up with $2/liter? Did they get liters and cubic feet mixed up while doing their research?
Food grade Argon is actually half the price of industrial argon.
See https://www.airgas.com/product/Gases/Argon/p/AR%20FG300 vs https://www.airgas.com/product/Gases/Argon/p/AR%20300 vs https://www.airgas.com/product/Gases/Argon/p/AR%20UHP300
As such, "food" grade argon is actually less pure than industrial argon - food grade is 99.996 and industrial grade is 99.998
The practical difference is what contaminants exist - because argon is non-reactive, in food grade argon they are just trying to remove contaminants you don't want in food.
In industrial grade argon, mainly used for welding, almost any kind of impurity can cause issues, whether it would be "safe to eat" or not.
He works for Airgas, clearly :)
I'm with you on pricing - i pay about the same.
Actually, Airgas has research grade xenon at $132/standard liter. So much more than they are claiming in the article.
https://www.chem.purdue.edu/chemsafety/docs/equip/Manual_MVE...
My impression is that there are lots in Russia but you'd have to know Russian to find them.
It *will* kill you straight away–it's an asphyxiant gas, any mistake involving oxygen supply will kill you in a few minutes, or leave you incapacitated and brain-damaged for the rest of your life. It's somewhat more hazardous than most, because it's (substantially) heaver than air, and accumulates in lungs.
(And you can be certain there will be mistakes, because a large subgroup of the users will be binge-drinking escapism addicts experimenting alone, drunk, self-administering this anesthetic out of a party balloon. The substack's rose-tinted focus on "luxury clinics" whitewashes the nature of hard drug use).
I wanted to avoid thinking about that failure mode where you accidentally cleave some part of the gas regulator by damaging it, and that turns the tank into a cold-gas rocket motor. We were shown pictures of the aftermath of those lab accidents—I think there was one were a tank embedded itself into a ceiling?
edit: Now I remember the follow-up—after a professor witnessed us, they showed us the correct method. It was simply to send the tank up in the elevator unattended—one undergrad pushing the "up" button and stepping out, the other waiting for it on the destination floor. Stupidly simple.
That works great until somebody in an intermediate floor enters the elevator oblivious to the risk and suffocates.
A stairwell you can run up, or out a door. An elevator can get stuck - or just take awhile - and there is nothing you can do about it.
Also an issue with liquid nitrogen, but that usually takes a little longer to sublimate.
Dry ice is one of the few grocery store substances (in many areas) with a similar issue, but at least co2 causes a suffocation reflex we can feel. So less dangerous.
> Xenon is considered “the perfect anesthetic” for 5 reasons:
> It’s extremely fast-acting — xenon gas kicks into full effect within seconds
> It wears off quickly — once the gas is removed, normal consciousness comes back within a minute or two
> It doesn’t interact with other drugs
> It leaves no lasting side effects or toxicity
> The anesthetic state xenon induces is extraordinarily powerful
The vast majority of drug incompatibilities are not a result of the physical interactions between the molecules. It's the undesirable effects that they exert in tandem on physiology. A vasodilator and a negative inotrope don't have to chemically react with each other to give a patient a very bad time.
I will acknowledge that xenon does appear to have interesting effects, but nobody should be base their health and safety on what the author has written. Their analysis on its safety is far far far too superficial to be worth anything.
The full episode takes very disturbing twists and turns, worth a watch.
Edit: I think this is it but have not watched https://youtu.be/ZVahys8MWLo
The shorter clip is the one I was thinking about and my mind went right to it when I saw this article.
Edit: Yes the full one is that second link.
If you're looking for a great NMDA inhalant experience I'd recommend another classic 19th century anesthetic, diethyl ether. It is extremely simple to produce -- heat everclear and sulfuric acid together and distill. Adjust the PH afterwards. Anyone can make diethyl ether. The actual meat of the ether experience is actually on par with Xenon. I'd say the only element that makes it worse is the aftertaste.
It's still a tradition among Lemkos in the Carpathians (Slava Ukraini!) to drink ether. Drinking is a little trickier, as the boiling point of ether is lower than your body temperature. You should chew and swallow some crushed ice beforehand, and also serve a bit in a shotglass with some crushed ice and lemon shaved ice to offset the taste. I've also found pina colada mix to be a great accompaniment. If you're just starting out with ether I recommend just inhaling the vapor.
Is it like suddenly an lsd trip and than suddenly out again?
Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
I very doubt it is true. The article poorly hand waves later that a brain without oxygen will starve.
I bet shooting this crap for some short term high will burn your brain cells, even if mixed with oxygen.
Saying „The long term effects of Xenon on the human body and brain are still mostly undocumented when it comes to repeated recreational use.“ sounds so much better!
Especially since almost all common magnets don’t actually effect a hard drives functionality. The internet states you need a magnet with a force of 0,5kg to actually cause data loss. So we’re talking a large neodymium magnet. Which makes this analogy even worse.
It’s honestly incredibly how much your analogy upsets me!
"How does xenon produce anaesthesia?" https://www.nature.com/articles/24525
It is not typically used in most countries because it is very expensive compared to alternatives, but it is approved in many countries for anesthesia: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3626616
I found this article very weak, but Xenon is quite a real drug.
You seem to be responding to this as if it is saying that your brain is immune to injury from Xenon abuse, which is never a claim that the article made. It is clearly stated that oxygen deprivation through Xenon inhalation can cause death.
Now, 30 seconds of oxygen deprivation is sure to cause your brain to "starve" in the sense that oxygen levels will drop enough to affect your consciousness, but that's absolutely not enough oxygen deprivation to cause brain damage, given that the general method is to trip off of a single inhale, similarly to how Nitrous Oxide is used recreationally.
To sum it up from my limited understanding: This disturbs the quantum coherance in the microtubelies in all cells (But mostly nurons) which is needed for consciousness to "limit" itself to a identity.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jpcb.3c07936
It is best to really do the research and not rely on people who already have made up their mind (that Dawkins guy for example seems like he really wants Materialism to be true).
There is no doubt that small structures exhibit quantum effects. There is absolutely no demonstrable relationship between small things exhibiting quantum effects and consciousness.
You give your whole game away when you say
’which is needed for consciousness to "limit" itself to an identity.’
This is actually mysticism. You’re already making absolutely extreme claims for what you believe consciousness to be.
It may well be that consciousness is ‘in the microtubules’. But today we have no evidence of this. Nor do we have effective understandings of why anaesthetic drugs work (as opposed to, say, our mechanistic understanding of how opioids cause analgesia, or other pharmapsychophysiological relationships).
Keep an open mind, but don’t let your brain fall out
The way this dude throws around quantum and co is just esotherical.
"While the emergence of consciousness from brain dynamics is commonly accepted" https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Phenomenal-consciousness...
"Consciousness as an Emergent Phenomenon: A Tale of Different Levels of Description" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7597170/