Party with gas, play with fire: The dangerous renaissance of ‘whippets’ in the music scene

By August Brown, Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — In November, Bob Bryar, the 44-year-old former drummer for the emo band My Chemical Romance, was found dead in his Tennessee home.

Months later, Bryar’s autopsy raised a possible contributing factor in his death — three canisters of nitrous oxide found next to his corpse, with tubing for inhalation still attached.

Nitrous oxide is a common product with medical, industrial and culinary uses, but it’s also used as a recreational drug when inhaled. The Bedford County Medical Examiner’s office in Tennessee said the nitrous oxide equipment found with Bryar raised questions of an “intentional or accidental overdose,” though Bryar’s cause of death was “undetermined” due to the state of decomposition.

The circumstances of Bryar’s death unnerved fans of My Chemical Romance albums like “The Black Parade.” But they also raised new worries about nitrous oxide abuse in music communities today.

The compound is known colloquially among recreational drug users as “whippets,” “balloons,” “hippie crack” or “Galaxy Gas,” after one popular brand. Several prominent rap and R&B artists have recently spoken out the negative impacts of nitrous oxide within their scenes.

While opioids like fentanyl are a much more acute threat to drug users, this old and often misunderstood substance might be a renewed concern for festival-goers as well. The Los Angeles City Council has proposed banning its sale, but is that the most effective strategy to keep users safe?

“I think we’re clearly seeing another wave of nitrous oxide having rising popularity,” said Mitchell Gomez, the executive director of the drug harm reduction organization DanceSafe, which works to keep music fans safe at festivals and concerts. “There are lots of people entering this market with different flavorings, different sizes, different delivery nozzles. But there’s a balancing act. If we lived in a world where you could pass a law and suddenly nobody could get it, a ban would make sense. But we don’t live in that world.”

Nitrous oxide was first synthesized in the late 18th century, by dampening iron filings with nitric acid and heating it to create a gas. It interrupts the ways neurotransmitters communicate in the brain for a brief period — usually less than a minute unless inhaled continuously. Its effects, including a languid euphoria with light hallucinations, were quickly noted. For decades, it was a popular party drug among the English aristocracy, who reveled in “laughing gas parties” before it was first used as an anesthetic and analgesic in medical settings.

Nitrous oxide also has industrial uses to increase the power of internal combustion engines, and as an aerosol propellant for foods like whipped cream. The brand Galaxy Gas comes in a variety of flavors like mango smoothie and vanilla cupcake for such purposes. (The company did not respond to requests for comment.) Metal canisters are easily purchasable in local vape shops and online, even though mass retailers like Amazon and Walmart have pulled listings more recently.

This month, the Food and Drug Administration issued a new warning against inhaling nitrous oxide: “These products are marketed as both unflavored and flavored nitrous oxide canisters and are sold as a food processing propellant for whipped cream and culinary food use. Intentional misuse or inhalation of contents can lead to serious adverse health events, including death.”

“The prevalence of N2O use is difficult to quantify but appears to be increasing,” cited one International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health study in 2022. “Research on N2O harms and application of harm reduction strategies are limited,” but “recreational nitrous oxide use is popular with young people.”

Inhaling nitrous oxide has long- and short-term risks that are worth considering, said Dr. Brian Hurley, medical director of the bureau of substance abuse prevention and control at the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.

While inhaling it, nitrous oxide can cause “dizziness and dissociation, where people feel essentially that they’re not in their bodies,” Hurley said. “People might lose track of where they are, blurred vision, loss of balance. There’s nausea, chest tightness, headache, vomiting and impaired memory.”

Long-term use can also cause a deficiency of vitamin B-12, which leads to reduced white blood cell count and anemia. The more immediate risk comes when users, often alone, attach tubing equipment to inhale the gas in larger amounts.

“If somebody straps on nitrous oxide with a mask and loses consciousness, their oxygen level isn’t being monitored,” Hurley said. “People can actually die from suffocation because they’re not getting any oxygen. They’re breathing, but they’re breathing nitrous oxide, and now they’re anesthetized, so they’re not in a position to respond to take the mask off. So we see deaths from nitrous oxide, not like if they took an opioid and their respiratory drive was suppressed, but because they were anesthetized and didn’t have a path of their airway to oxygen.”

Purchasing nitrous oxide with the intent to inhale is a misdemeanor in California — users face six months in jail and/or a $1,000 fine.

Nonetheless, nitrous oxide has been popular in music and festival communities for decades. Fans sucking on balloons of nitrous oxide are a common sight outside jam band concerts. Major festivals like Glastonbury banned the substance years ago, and Coachella bans both aerosol products and drug paraphernalia. But the substance has earned new fans on social media platforms like TikTok, where influencers sell nitrous equipment or show off its euphoric, dissociative effects.

The Black music community in particular, has started to push back on the substance’s popularity.

“Sorry to be old n annoying but… Is no one gonna talk about how galaxy gas came out of no where and is being MASS marketed to black children?” the singer SZA wrote on X in September, linking to a study from Yale’s school of medicine. “The government is doing NOTHING ? .. since when are we selling whip its at the store ???? Somebody protect the children.”

That same month, the rapper Lil Gnar posted a video with a caption “How to use Galaxy Gas.” He opened the nozzle and chucked the canister into a gas station dumpster.

In 2022, at a BET tribute to the disgraced rap mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs, rapper Kanye West (now known as Ye) said that “I was at the dentist office the other day, I was taking a nitrous oxide, I suggest it if anybody is, like, stressed out.” Last year, Milo Yiannopoulos, the right-wing provocateur and West’s former chief of staff, said in an affidavit to the FBI and the California Dental Board that “employees at all levels of the company were worrying about Ye’s dependence on the gas and speaking openly about it. Ye talked about it non-stop in meetings. He seemed to be in and out of the inhaler mask on a near-constant basis.”

Other fans have artists like Lil Uzi Vert, who appeared in a video using nitrous oxide on social media. (“They said I was lost,” Uzi rapped on their recent track “We Good,” which addressed their nitrous use. “They thought I was a dead guy / I was on that NOS.”)

For those who work in harm reduction within drug and music scenes, it’s hard to tell if nitrous oxide is more popular or just more visible. “I’m not sure if this is a new wave, but we do know that the new party drugs have been changing,” said Laura Guzman, executive director of the National Harm Reduction Coalition. “There’s a shift in the way young adults are partying. There’s less alcohol and cocaine, and more use of ketamine and psychedelics like mushrooms.”

For concert promoters who have rightly focused on preventing opioid overdoses, fans’ nitrous use may call for fresh attention. “What we would love is that in any party scene, there are actual conversations about health,” Guzman said. “Avoid using alone or in dangerous or isolated places. Never put plastic bags over the head or block breathing. Avoid using it in closed spaces without ventilation. Try to avoid drinking alcohol or taking other drugs with it. Give yourself time to breathe fresh air.”

Local governments have explored a blanket ban on retail sales in Los Angeles.

In a 14-0 vote late last year, the Los Angeles City Council asked the city attorney to make recommendations for implementing a ban on the retail sale of nitrous oxide in Los Angeles, following similar regulations in Rialto.

“Nitrous oxide is a trending drug that is extremely addictive, harmful, and now more than ever, easily accessible at smoke and tobacco shops across the city,” Councilmember Imelda Padilla said last year.

“California law allows individuals 18 years and older to purchase nitrous oxide, as long as it is not inhaled after purchase,” Padilla continued. “This makes the law difficult to enforce and allows vendors, such as smoke shops and liquor stores, to sell nitrous oxide products. Studies have shown that adding flavors and colorful packaging to drug products play a key role in youth initiation and continued use.”

Experts in harm reduction have doubts that a retail ban will do much to prevent abuse though, and might lead nitrous users to buy from unsafe sources and get high in more dangerous environments. Rather than purchasing a flavored food product sold at a retail outlet, they might look for industrial alternatives full of toxic heavy metals, or use it in private with greater suffocation risks.

“This idea that you’re going to ban it in an effective way seems really unlikely,” Gomez said. “You can probably make it a little more expensive for consumers and constrict access. But if you’ve made it illegal, the people selling it are [by definition] criminals. Whereas now, if there’s a problem with a particular batch, you could recall it. If a company was intentionally advertising towards minors, you could go after those bad actors.

“There’s a reason this drug was in heavy use by the 1800s,” he continued. “I just don’t really think that there’s a way of effectively banning a substance when that substance exists in such massive quantities within perfectly valid industrial uses. Diversion is just too easy.”

While nitrous oxide may not pose the same public health risk as opioids, it’s been an established part of contemporary party culture for centuries. Celebrity deaths and concern from other artists may be an opportunity for more effective public health messaging, said Hurley.

“I think what we do see now is waves of awareness,” he said. “When there are high profile deaths, there’s a rush of awareness around inhalant use as a factor impacting the health and wellness of our community.

“I don’t think that people think inhaling nitrous oxide from a canister intended for charging food products mistakes that for a healthy behavior,” he continued. “But I do think there is the perception that the risk is small. We want to help make sure the community is well aware of the risks associated with nitrous oxide, so that people can make informed decisions.”

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