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Comment by elevaet | Hacker News Reader

This is a bit off topic, but what do you think about people doing nitrous recreationally? It's always concerned me that people are inhaling close to pure nitrous oxide and holding it in. I've always wondered if this creates damaging low-oxygen conditions without the normal reflexes kicking in, and if this can cause brain/neuronal damage.

I believe in medical settings it's delivered in a mixture with O2, but in recreational settings it's usually inhaled directly.

I see a lot more talk about the risks of vitamin B12 depletion, and not much talk about O2 deprivation, so not sure if everyone else is crazy or if it's me who is the crazy one.

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I'm not one to tell people not to have fun, but i also lost a friend to respiratory failure after prolonged nitrous abuse, and had more then one start having auditory hallucinations. I think it's waning in popularity compared to 10 years ago, but maybe I'm just out of touch with what the kids get high on these days

In zero tolerance Sweden, nitrous is oddly perfectly legal. In fact, I recently got a cheerful flyer from our municipal waste disposal company announcing that empty 1L nitrous bottles can now be left with common household hazardous waste.

I was being treated with nitrous medically. I asked the anaesthesiologist about how it works recreationally and his answer was that yes, it was mostly just hypoxia.

Bullshit. You aren't supposed to be hypoxic when using nitrous. You take a half-breath of air, and then breathe in the n2o.

So, you get half the oxygen needed and somehow doing so doesn't cause hypoxia, which means “deficiency in the amount of oxygen reaching the tissues”?

You don't get half the oxygen. You get as much oxygen as you would during normal calm breathing, which is pretty shallow. Basically, you take a normal breath, which is about 50% lung volume, and then fill your lung up to max capacity with n2o.

But you know what? Pulse oximeters are pretty cheap nowadays. Try it for yourself.

I see. So, you take a normal breath and top it up with N2O. That makes sense.

This is easily falsified by a cursory internet search about the physiological mechanism behind nitrous oxide's effects. It is appalling that a medical professional would so confidently give you an uneducated, crackpot answer. The exact same mechanism which knocks you out gives you euphoria at lower doses.

If someone holds their breath long enough to cause hypoxia when inhaling nitrous oxide, they have other problems. You can easily hold your breath 1-2 minutes while sitting on a couch without experiencing hypoxia. If you're experiencing euphoria as strong as what nitrous oxide causes from hypoxia, you're basically about to die.

This is why you shouldn't trust experts on stuff outside their speciality, this answer is just wrong.

You don't even need to research it, the lived experience of being in a dentist office with mixed oxygen and nitrous produces the recreational effects - if it was mostly hypoxia, having oxygen mixed in would have a greatly diminished "recreational" effect.

I mean, it is true most people doing it recreationally are giving themselves mild to severe hypoxia, but that doesn't mean the effect is caused by hypoxia

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