She Died From a Can of Computer Cleaner. Arizona's Fix Is a Felony Charge — for the Next Buyer, Not the Can.

Renna O’Rourke was 19 years old when she inhaled the contents of a can of computer duster and went into cardiac arrest. She spent a week in the ICU at HonorHealth Scottsdale Osborn before she died, in May of 2025. Her mother, Claudia Dimit, has spent the time since becoming the thing nobody wants to become: an expert, by force, in how a product you can buy at any office-supply store stops a young heart.

Nobody has proposed regulating the can. Arizona has proposed arresting the next person who buys one.

That’s the sentence sitting underneath two stories that are actually one story about inhalants — the substance class that gets less coverage than almost any other, largely because it doesn’t look like a “real” drug problem until a family is living inside one. The first: the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission spent roughly two years working on a rule that would have made duster cans — the aerosol electronics-cleaner sold at Staples and Walmart and Amazon — harder to misuse for the specific purpose of getting high, then quietly withdrew the proposal in August 2025, three months after Renna died. The second: Arizona state Rep. Julie Willoughby introduced HB 2191, which would make possession of amyl nitrite (“poppers”) and nitrous oxide for recreational use a class 5 felony in the state. Two governments, two responses to the same category of harm, and neither one touches the product. One regulator looked at the can and walked away. One legislature looked at the person holding it and reached for a felony charge.

If you’ve ever done a whip-it in a parking lot, or huffed a can behind a job you needed to get through, because it felt like the safe one — legal, sold next to the printer paper, gone in ninety seconds, nothing like the drugs that get people arrested — you already know how far that logic carries you before it stops being true. It stopped being true for Renna O’Rourke on a day in May.

The myth this keeps landing next to

Here is the detail that should stop you: the Arizona bill’s own coverage notes that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has, in 2025, promoted a claim that poppers — not a virus — cause AIDS. That is not a new theory. It is one of the oldest, most damaging dead ends in the history of American public health.

In the earliest, most frightened years of the AIDS epidemic, before HIV had been isolated as the retrovirus responsible, a strain of research and public commentary fixated on amyl nitrite — heavily used at the time in gay nightlife — as a cause of the immune collapse doctors were seeing, rather than a substance some patients happened to also use. Real research hours went into chasing that theory. It gave cover to the idea that the epidemic was a lifestyle problem rather than a virus, which delayed the urgency of the actual public health response by precious time nobody could get back. Once HIV was identified in 1983 and 1984, the poppers-causation theory collapsed under its own evidence. It has stayed dead in every serious virology department in the country since.

It is not dead in Washington. When a sitting HHS secretary revives a forty-year-old discredited claim in the same policy season a state legislature is writing a felony statute around the same substance, the lesson isn’t really about poppers. It’s about how easily “this substance is dangerous” slides into “the people who use it are the problem,” and how that slide has, historically, cost the country time it needed to spend somewhere else. We have watched this exact substitution happen before. We are watching the setup for it happen again.

What’s actually happening in the body, and why criminalizing it doesn’t touch that

Strip away the political noise and there is real, unglamorous, peer-reviewed medicine underneath this story, and it argues for treatment infrastructure, not jail cells.

Strip away the political noise and there is real, unglamorous, peer-reviewed medicine underneath this story, and it argues for treatment infrastructure, not jail cells.

A 2025 review in the journal Cureus — analyzing 13 studies of nitrous oxide misuse under the “Galaxy Gas” branding that made it a social-media trend — found that chronic use causes something with a formal name, subacute combined degeneration of the spinal cord, and a plain-language description that’s worse: nitrous oxide inactivates the vitamin B12 your nerves need to keep their protective coating intact, and without it the coating breaks down, causing numbness, weakness, and gait problems that can look, on an MRI, like an “inverted V” burned into the spinal cord. Among hospitalized patients in the review, 60.3% had developed anxiety and 63.5% had developed depression — this is not a drug that leaves the mind alone even when it doesn’t kill you outright. The National Institute on Drug Abuse’s own research page states that 50 to 80% of regular inhalant users show measurable cognitive impairment — memory, attention, judgment — from damage to the brain regions that govern them.

None of that is an argument for scaring people away with a felony charge. It’s an argument for exactly what a felony charge makes harder: showing up. If getting caught with a canister means prison time, the calculation for anyone using inhalants — or anyone standing next to someone using them when something goes wrong — shifts hard toward silence. This is the core case for harm reduction over criminalization, and it is not an abstraction here: it is the difference between someone calling 911 for a friend who’s turning blue and someone deciding the risk of a felony record is worse than the risk of waiting it out alone.

The CBS News investigation into the “Galaxy Gas” phenomenon is the part of this story that should make any parent’s stomach drop: bright, flavored canisters marketed like a lifestyle product, sold openly online, promoted across hundreds of TikTok and YouTube videos, until enough public backlash forced the company to halt retail sales in 2024. SAMHSA’s most recent national survey data confirms what that marketing pattern would predict: past-year inhalant use sits at 1.1% for the population 12 and older, but 3.7% among 12-to-17-year-olds — more than three times the rate of the adults around them. This has always been overwhelmingly a young person’s way into substance use, precisely because it’s cheap, legal to buy, and doesn’t look like a “drug” until it’s too late.

The states that are actually trying something different

Arizona isn’t the only place legislating this in 2026, and the contrast is instructive. Since spring, South Carolina, Tennessee, Washington, and Florida have all passed laws restricting retail sale of nitrous oxide for recreational use — fining the businesses that sell flavored canisters to teenagers, not arresting the teenagers. San Francisco’s board of supervisors is weighing the same approach after watching canisters sell for up to $150 apiece at local smoke shops, and pointed to the United Kingdom’s 2023 nationwide sales restriction, which was followed by a 60% decline in nitrous oxide use among young people — real evidence that regulating supply, rather than punishing possession, actually moves the number that matters.

That’s the model available to Arizona right now, sitting in plain view in five other states’ statute books. HB 2191 takes the opposite bet: it leaves the canisters on every shelf in the state and puts the legal risk entirely on the person who picks one up, disproportionately a teenager who saw it trending on their phone. If the goal is fewer Renna O’Rourkes, the sales-restriction states are betting on the supply side of that equation. Arizona is betting on the demand side, and betting that fear of prosecution outperforms fear of the actual, documented, spine-damaging risk that didn’t stop Renna. It didn’t stop her because nobody told her the can could do that. A felony charge doesn’t tell her either. A label, an age check at the register, and a retailer who can’t sell it recreationally might have.

Arizona is betting on the demand side, and betting that fear of prosecution outperforms fear of the actual, documented, spine-damaging risk that didn’t stop Renna.

What’s still true, even here

There is one piece of this story that is not bleak, and it deserves to be said plainly rather than buried: unlike a fentanyl overdose, where minutes are everything and the damage from a missed dose of naloxone can be permanent, nitrous oxide nerve damage caught early is often reversible. Yale neuropsychiatrist Dr. Tova Gardin documented a case of a man in his 30s who developed numbness and gait problems after months of daily use — and who recovered function through cessation, vitamin B12 treatment, physical therapy, and psychiatric support once he got into a doctor’s office. The window exists. The thing that closes it fastest is a person deciding they can’t afford to be seen getting help.

If you’re a clinician reading this: ask directly. Patients rarely volunteer “dusting” or nitrous use unprompted, because it doesn’t register to them as the kind of thing you tell a doctor. A B12 level and a straightforward question — “have you been using whip-its, poppers, or duster” — costs a minute and is, per Yale’s case data, the difference between catching nerve involvement while it’s still reversible and catching it after it isn’t.

Claudia Dimit didn’t get that window for her daughter. She’s spent the months since Renna died pushing legislators and regulators to look at the product instead of the person — the same argument South Carolina, Washington, Tennessee, and Florida have already written into law this year. Arizona’s legislature is due to take HB 2191 up again, and the choice in front of it is not complicated: regulate what’s actually sold on the shelf, or keep writing felony charges for the people who reach for it because nobody ever told them what it could do. One of those choices might have given Renna O’Rourke’s mother a different spring.