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Good morning, my name is Oshan Jarow and I’m a staff writer with Future Perfect at Vox. Today, I’m looking at the history of nitrous oxide, a gas most of us might know from the dentist’s office. 

Doctors use nitrous as a mild anesthetic, sending patients off into dissociative euphorias before pulling a tooth or yanking a dislocated finger straight again. As a pressurized gas, nitrous also powers rockets, race cars, and whipped cream dispensers.

But inhaling nitrous can also be fun. It gives us a loopy, giddy sort of high that can last up to five minutes. Since it’s both legal and cheap, nitrous has been used as a recreational drug for centuries — yes, centuries.  More recently, it’s been everywhere from Grateful Dead concerts in the ’60s to raves in the ’90s, under a variety of names: laughing gas, galaxy gas, hippy crack, whippets, even “the atmosphere of heaven.”

Covid lockdowns set off a new wave of recreational nitrous use. “People on Nitrous Gas” has its own TikTok discovery tab. Celebrities from Kanye West to SZA are raising awareness about its use. Even the social media influencers of “MomTok” are raving about it. And as use rises among some teenagers, the risks of misusing or abusing nitrous are gaining more attention, and even raising questions of prohibition.

As someone who covers the science of consciousness, I tend to write a lot about mind-altering drugs. They often challenge the line between medicine and recreation, and raise tough conversations about how to balance risks and benefits, and even what we value as a culture. 

All this talk of nitrous gave me a great excuse to dig up its exceptionally strange and interesting history.

In the late 1700s, poets flocked to nitrous as the source of an entirely new kind of pleasure. Through the 1800s, public theaters filled with volunteers huffing nitrous onstage as a form of entertainment for the crowds. Celebrated philosophers used the gas in Harvard’s chemistry laboratories, searching for new insights into the nature of the mind.

The history of nitrous isn’t just a good story. 

It can also help expand our conversations around the long-standing allure of nitrous, and what the future of recreational use can, or should, look like. To that end, here are a few things worth knowing about nitrous that I learned during my reporting.

Annick Vanderschelden Photography

One big risk is vitamin B12 deficiency. Nitrous inactivates B12 in the body, which coupled with long-term use can lead to nerve damage across the brain and spine. Without restoring levels of B12, that can develop into paralysis or brain damage.

Nitrous itself doesn’t have a known fatal dose, but deaths from use have been known to occur, usually from accidents that happen while high on nitrous or from asphyxiation. Across the UK, which has more detailed nitrous statistics, there were just 56 deaths attributed to nitrous between 2001 and 2020, including both recreational and medical settings. (To put that in some perspective, there were nearly 10,000 deaths in the UK attributed to alcohol in 2021 alone.)

And while nitrous isn’t considered physically addictive in the way that opioids are (you won’t show physical symptoms of withdrawal, for example), there’s a renewed conversation about whether nitrous should still be considered an addictive substance. A cheap and legal form of dissociative pleasure basically on tap does pose some habit-forming risk.

A young lab assistant named Humphry Davy at a medical research facility called the Pneumatic Institute in Bristol was the first to safely synthesize nitrous. A chemist had discovered it in 1772, but mistakenly dismissed it as toxic. 

After discovering that when properly made, nitrous oxide was perfectly breathable and fun, word got out. Nitrous became something of a party fixture. Some thought it could replace Champagne as a nightcap at dinner parties.

Crowds began gathering at lecture halls and auditoriums to watch volunteers take nitrous onstage and flail about. During a show in 1844, the American dentist Horace Wells witnessed a teenager on nitrous slam into a wooden bench. The boy, Wells noticed, seemed to feel no pain, which led him to wonder whether he could give the gas to clients to numb the pain of having a tooth pulled.

After a series of self experiments and public demonstrations, nitrous made its way into dentistry. Innovations in the delivery mechanism — namely, figuring out how to distribute it in liquid form that would fit in canisters — began to spread dental nitrous use across the country. 

Allan Tannenbaum/Getty Images

A chemistry student in the 1930s figured out that nitrous oxide worked really well for the preservation of cream, which led to the nitrous-filled whipped cream dispensers we see in grocery stores. These “whippets,” however, have also helped make recreational nitrous use what it is today.

The history of nitrous is a history of shifting cultural attitudes about the value of chemically altered states of consciousness. Today is no different.

With psychedelic drugs like LSD or psilocybin mushrooms, advocates are pushing for wider accessibility. Nitrous is already accessible, and panic over the risks is pushing policy in the other direction, as with the UK’s recreational nitrous ban last year.

But nitrous offers us an opportunity today. Since it has relatively few risks when used responsibly and occasionally, we could focus on public education that promotes responsible forms of use. 

Building the institutions and know-how to get that process right won’t only help mitigate the tragedies that result from nitrous abuse. It would help build the necessary infrastructure to support rising legal access to other mind-altering drugs, too. 

Through the centuries, people have found everything from God to the true meaning of the enigmatic philosophy of Hegel while on nitrous.

I’m not saying nitrous actually reveals God, or the correct interpretation of Hegel’s notoriously dense work. But clearly, there’s more at play here than a numbing agent for tooth-pulling and whipped cream dispensing.  Public education that helps to safely explore those wider, stranger potentials of nitrous would make a great next chapter for this curious substance that has long straddled the line between medicine and recreation. 

Rabih Daher/AFP via Getty Images

Israel has invaded Lebanon. Here’s what could come next: Israel has begun what it is calling a “limited” military invasion of Lebanon. More than 1,000 Lebanese people have been killed and 6,000 have been wounded, and as many as a million people have been displaced. Here’s what we know about the dangerous new phase in the long conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.

The dock workers’ strike, explained: 45,000 dock workers have walked off the job on the East and Gulf Coasts, affecting ports that handle 50 percent of the imports and exports to the US. It’s unclear how long the strike might last, but here’s what we know about the strike and the industries that might be affected by the work stoppage.

How Vance made the right-wing agenda sound moderate: At the vice presidential debate Tuesday night, former President Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance represented his ticket as one interested in common-sense conservatism that wants to protect liberal democracy. However, he downplayed the true radicalism of Trump’s agenda by conveying a false impression of their positions —  making his most radical ideas seem palatable.

Speaking of false facts: X owner Elon Musk has been elevating false right-wing talking points about immigration, claiming that Democrats have fast-tracked citizenship applications to rig elections. Former President Donald Trump has also been perpetuating this idea in his own rhetoric. These lies could have extreme consequences, sowing serious doubt about the legitimacy of the election results come November.

How Helene put the world’s chip supply at risk: The high-silicon, low-contaminant nature of quartz in Spruce Pine, found in a series of mines in the Appalachian Mountains, makes it integral to advanced microchip manufacturing. However, the mines are now closed indefinitely due to the effects of Hurricane Helene, which dumped 2 feet of water on Spruce Pine and devastated the area.  

Breast cancer on the rise: While the vast majority of breast cancer cases and deaths still occur among older women, a new study from the American Cancer Society found that rates of breast cancer rose by 1 percent a year from 2012 to 2021, and even more sharply among women under the age of 50. [The New York Times]

Setting new boundaries: Due to the effects of climate change, Switzerland and Italy are redrawing their borders near the Alps. Clarifying the borders will help both countries determine who is responsible for upkeep in specific natural areas as glaciers continue to melt over time.

[BBC]

Sean Gallup/Getty Images

That's the number of people who die annually from cardiovascular diseases caused by lead poisoning, imposing a global cost of about $6 trillion a year.

A study found that about half of children in poor countries are exposed to very high levels of lead, but despite that, charities and nongovernmental organizations are generally spending less than two cents per child poisoned by lead to solve the problem. To combat the crisis,  the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and UNICEF launched the Partnership for a Lead-Free Future initiative. Here’s how this endeavor could shift this neglected issue to the forefront of the global health conversation.

Jonathan Raa / NurPhoto/Corbis via Getty Images

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Today’s edition was produced and edited by senior editor Lavanya Ramanathan, with contributions from staff editor Melinda Fakuade. We'll see you tomorrow!

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