An Ode to Laughing Gas, A Very Weird Drug

Swhooooshhhh! Swhooooshhhh! “Three for a tenner, yeah?” Swhooooshhhh! The soundtrack to the British summer. I feel like we all have a bizarre nitrous oxide moment, right? Mine was in July 2011. I was at an annual rave called Unity Day in Leeds, caning loons [laughing gas balloons] on Woodhouse Moor, where the students usually congregate to drink and drink and drink until it’s time for them to stumble home to inevitably find out that they’ve been burgled. 

While we were mid-balloon, the emcee stopped the music and announced the death of Amy Winehouse. “That’s what happens when you take the bad drugs,” he declared on the mic while the DJ immediately dropped a dnb remix of one of her tracks. (It was alcohol that tragically killed Amy. I’m not sure if that’s what the emcee meant by “bad drugs”. If he did, I agree, alcohol is a really shit drug compared to many others.) 

When I came round from the nos trip, it was real: Amy had died. But that’s the strange thing about nos, isn’t it? You don’t know what’s real for a moment. 

As a drug, nos is a fucking weirdo. They should sell it as ‘confusion in a balloon’, as it usually goes something like this. Inhalation one, sounds start to echo in a weird way. Inhalation two, reality melts away like an ice lolly on a hot summer afternoon. Inhalation three, you’re totally splintered from the real world, but you have some incredible and unique insight into something amazing. And inhalation four – well, you don’t even get to that point because the balloon escaped your grip and flitted away into the night. It’s over, and you don’t have any incredible or unique insight into anything at all. Other than the fact you’re an idiot. And you know it. 

Anyway, we won’t be legally Swhooooshhhh!-ing for much longer. The government announced this week that the possession of nos will be banned in three weeks’ time. It will become a Class-C controlled substance in the same category as anabolic steroids and benzos like Valium and Xanax, carrying punishments of up to two years in prison for possessing it and 14 years for supplying it. These maximum sentences are rarely enforced to that extent, but still, even if prison is unlikely, getting caught with a balloon could mean being banned from travelling to Australia, North America and China, and it could jeopardise any chances of working with kids or vulnerable adults. That’s a lot for a 40-second high followed by a headache. 

Editorial side quest: Remember when the police themselves used to sell nos? A weed activist group called Feed The Birds caught them selling it in 2016. They said they “regretted” that decision. Just wanted to get that in there. 

When you ask people about their weirdest nos-related memories, you get some entertaining answers. “Every time I take nos, I have the same trip,” a friend, who is a 28-year-old designer, tells me. “I think I’ve discovered the funniest joke in the world, but as soon as the trip is over, I can’t remember it. But it got dark on one trip because I came to the realisation that the joke was actually me.” Yikes. 

“I once was breathing so heavily on a balloon that I accidentally started to make sex noises,” a 27-year-old receptionist in London told me. “It felt good, though.” How did she know that she was making these noises? “I had no idea, but as the balloon faded out, everyone was looking at me so weirdly.” They added: “It was really embarrassing, it put me off balloons.” 

Making orgasmic sounds in public is one thing, but confusing your partner with their sibling in a nitrous-induced stupor is another. “I wanted to fuck my boyfriend’s sister because they look similar, and I thought she was him,” a 27-year-old yacht stewardess in Birmingham tells me. “As the trip ended, I was intensely staring at her for ages. I was so confused.” You’d think that she might have kept her short-lived infatuation to herself, right? No, actually: “I told her a few weeks later and she found it funny.”  

Marginally more horrifying than accidentally lusting after your partner’s sibling is when you suddenly face death halfway through a balloon. “I was in a car that flipped because the driver was doing loons,” a 19-year-old junior software engineer in Birmingham remembers. “It happens more often than you think.” Everyone was OK. “What happened didn’t really hit me until I was out looking at the upside-down car. I think that was because of the balloon.” What happened to the driver? “The police got involved the morning after. A farmer found the car on a country lane. I think he got banned.” Suffice to say, that’s bad; nearly killing your friends for a vanishingly short high is a terrible vibe, etc. 

“I did a three-in-one balloon, and the gas actually told me how the world began,” a 25-year-old graphic designer from Norfolk recalls. “I forgot it after the trip, and the gas never shared its secrets again,” she added. “But I can’t blame it, that’s a biggie.” 

So, what have we learned here? Apart from the fact that nos is a weird drug for weird people, not a lot. But it’s not difficult to predict what will come next. History teaches us that banning drugs does not stop their use but it does increase their harm. The trade will be gifted to the underground criminal fraternity, who might not bother with quality control, vetting customers for age or anything unprofitable like that. Johnny in this garden shed in Salford will have a crack at knocking out his own canisters with no idea what he’s doing, and we’ll probably start to see the deaths early next year. All this for a drug with a lower harm profile than our favourite state-sponsored drug: alcohol. But that comes in a pint glass, not a balloon, so it’s probably alright. Right?