The Long History of Nitrous Oxide | Hacker News Reader

The Long History of Nitrous Oxide

smithsonianmag.com

19 pointssksxihve16 comments

As a kid growing up in the 80's and 90's in St. Louis - nitrous "whippets" were sold in every grocery and convenience store. I never considered myself a drug user when I was a teen - because every drug I enjoyed (nitrous, cough syrup, caffeine pills) were all legally available....unlike those dirty hippies and their marijuana!

It's been decades since I hit a balloon - but man those moments when I did were incredible.

many years ago an old wizard once said to me in passing 'the gas brings you closer to god', and ever since i have been reminded many times that he was very wise in his knowledge of magic

Ironically now weed is legal - and you can still get whippits at basically every gas station and porn shop.

Sorry for the horribly off-topic post, but as a car enthusiast, nitrous used to be one of the cheapest ways to make your car faster. However, recent price fluctuations (and making sure nitrous is reserved for medical uses first), along with the advent of a market flooded with cheap turbos from China, have made nitrous not worth the investment.

One promising technology that may gain some traction is compressed air [https://casupercharging.com/]. It's still a forced induction method and relatively simple to install compared to procharging or supercharging. That said, forced air has some major drawbacks — a very large tank, for one.

There's no real need to reserve nitrous oxide for medical (including dental) use. It's not a scarce natural resource or anything and can be manufactured cheaply from commodity inputs. Medical use has been steadily declining due to concerns over side effects and availability of superior alternatives for anesthesia.

> superior alternatives for anesthesia

Two of my kids were born using nitrous as anesthesia. This was years ago in San Diego, CA. I very clearly remember leaning in to my struggling wife and trying to motivate her: "Honey, remember, you need to breathe for the nitrous to work. Don't just hold your breath and bear down. You've got to breathe."

>While Hadland says it would take a lot of repeated heavy use of nitrous oxide to see these effects, over time such use could also cause permanent neurological issues.

This is not a could. Repeated abuse of nitrous, perhaps as little as daily use over 2 months, does cause neurological issues, including spinal cord damage and paralysis [1].

[1] https://sci-hub.ru/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31625167/

There's a lot of really bad anecdotal horror stories about B12 problems from chronic NO2 use. You don't want it to happen to you. If you absolutely want to try N02, don't use it more than a couple times a month.

Other risk factors for low B12 are opiate use, alcohol use and finally eating vegan. The biggest risks are stacking any of those lifestyle choices on top of Nitrous Overuse.

"Abuse" is such a vague term. For context, the amount is 100+ canisters/day

> Most patients also had psychiatric symptoms. Nearly every patient estimated using 100 or more canisters of nitrous oxide per day in the months before being seen. Four patients also reported engaging in B12 supplementation (both oral and parenteral), aiming to circumvent the harmful sequelae of prolonged nitrous oxide misuse.

100 chargers is not an enormous amount. That’s two normal sized boxes and when each one gets you high for 20 seconds it’s not hard to understand how you can rip through a box. Not trying to be dramatic here, I don’t consider people doing a couple whippets at a festival a public health issue, but from a harm reduction perspective the difference between occasional bouts and regular use of nitrous is somewhat distinct compared to other drugs.

I used nitrous oxide just one time, and it wasn't to get high: this was before the web, and I had read somewhere that the feeling of the need to breathe is not a result of lack of oxygen, but a buildup of carbon dioxide. My friends were doing whippits, and I figured that nitrous oxide wouldn't allow for the production of carbon dioxide, so if I breathed it -- no sense of need to breathe, right?

So I breathed out as much as I could, breathed in a full lungs-full of nitrous, and held my breath. I wish I had timed it, because I have no idea how long I held my breath, but at least 15-30 seconds, because I held my breath for a bit, then I was talking a bit (not breathing in, just out) somewhat, then holding my breath again and thinking.

My whole body went numb. I was giddy. My vision closed in and started to dim. And through it all I felt no need to breathe at all. As my vision was going away I was idly thinking, "Hmm, still no need to breathe. But my vision is going away, so I should probably breathe. What was I thinking? Oh yeah, no need to breathe but I should breathe anyway. What was that? Oh yeah, breathe before I lose consciousness because these idiots are all high and if I just died here, they'd let me. What? Oh, breathe, moron." And I breathed.

Like I said, I didn't time it, so I don't know how long it lasted. I idly breath-hold for fun, and I can easily go two minutes with no prep, but obviously that's with oxygen in my lungs, so it could have been anywhere from 20 seconds up to a minute or more?

I did the counter-experiment a bit later: we had dry ice, so I put some in the sink and let it build up to a foggy unspecified concentration. I breathed all the way out, carefully lowered my face in, and breathed in.

Or, I tried to. My entire body was instantly on fire, and I violently coughed it out in a split second. Hypothesis confirmed! :-)

“There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference.” Psychologist and philosopher William James, under the effects of nitrous oxide.

You gotta imagine his voice is like a rich bass, two octaves below James Earl Jones

[Inhaling nitrous has a voice effect more or less opposite that of helium]

I should mention that I have taken to purchasing bottles of Heavy Whipping Cream, for recreational culinary purposes, i.e. I simply drink the stuff straight, as if it were a bottle of milk. Yum.

I've had very similar thoughts to this while on nitrous oxide. In the moment it makes sense, but it's both very hard to describe, and very hard to retain post NO2.

I had hoped this was going to be about N2O as an oxidizer for rocketry.

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