There's No Narcan for What Killed Michael Robins

Michael Robins served in the Army. On September 21, 2021, at 31 years old, he was found dead with spent cans of computer duster spray scattered around him. Court filings from the lawsuit his estate later brought against the manufacturers show he’d spent $4,433.74 on canned air in the two and a half months before he died — can after can, bought legally, off shelves, with no ID required and no purchase limit. He died from DFE toxicity: his heart, poisoned by the chemical propellant he’d been breathing, simply stopped. DFE stands for 1,1-difluoroethane, the compressed gas that pushes the “air” out of a duster can. It isn’t air. It’s a refrigerant-family chemical, and inhaled directly and repeatedly, it’s lethal.

Inhalants are the deadliest substance class this newsroom has never covered, and neither has almost anyone else.

That’s the thesis, and it needs to sit there on its own for a second, because most people — including people in recovery from other things — genuinely do not know it’s true. You will not find inhalants in a fentanyl explainer or an opioid-settlement story. There’s no company to blame for pushing a patented drug, no scheduling fight in Congress, no black-market supply chain. There’s a can of duster from Walmart, or a tube of glue, or the propane tank in the garage. That mundanity is precisely why this substance class kills — an estimated 200 Americans a year — while getting essentially no sustained media attention.

The Cheapest High Is the One Nobody’s Watching For

The lawsuit against duster manufacturers AW, Falcon Safety Products, Norazza, and Walmart, filed in Georgia on September 20, 2023, puts it in language that should stop you: “Gram for gram, inhalants may be the cheapest, easiest, and one of the fastest ways for a user to get ‘high.’” That’s not editorializing. It’s a description of a market failure. A bottle of prescription opioids requires a doctor, a diagnosis, a pharmacy. A can of duster requires $6 and a checkout line. There is no age gate in most states, no purchase limit, no clerk trained to notice a customer buying a dozen cans a week.

That accessibility lands hardest on kids. According to the 2022 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, cited by MedlinePlus, about 2.3% of teens 12 to 17 used an inhalant in the past year — and the highest rates were among the youngest teens, not the oldest. That’s not a coincidence. Inhalants are frequently a kid’s first encounter with a mind-altering substance precisely because they’re legal, cheap, and sitting under the kitchen sink or on the office desk next to the keyboard. Nobody has to find a dealer. You just have to be curious and alone for five minutes.

No Tolerance Required, No Antidote Available

Here’s the part that should be a headline on its own: inhalant deaths don’t require repeated use, addiction, or a buildup of tolerance. Doctors call it “sudden sniffing death” — a plain-language way of saying the chemical vapor can trigger a fatal irregular heartbeat on someone’s very first try, in someone with no history of substance use at all. Poison-center data shows butane, propane, and air fresheners carry the highest fatality rates among inhalant categories, and among cases with a known outcome, 208 people died and more than 1,000 suffered life-threatening or permanently disabling injury.

Now compare that to opioids, where a bystander can carry naloxone (brand name Narcan) and reverse an overdose in progress. There is no equivalent for inhalants. Once sudden sniffing death starts, there’s no injection, no antidote, no ambulance-administered drug that pulls a person back. That gap is the single most consequential and least-discussed fact in this entire drug category, and it’s why prevention and honest conversation matter more here than almost anywhere else in addiction care. If you or someone you’re worried about is using inhalants, the harm-reduction floor is basic but real: never do it alone, tell someone where you are, and know that any dizziness, chest tightness, or blackout is a signal to stop and get help immediately, not to push through it.

Once sudden sniffing death starts, there’s no injection, no antidote, no ambulance-administered drug that pulls a person back.

The Bitterant That Didn’t Fix Anything

Manufacturers have known about this problem for a long time. Falcon Safety Products says it has been working on it for “more than 30 years,” and it was the first company to add a bittering agent — a chemical called denatonium benzoate, dosed to make the spray taste disgusting if it hits your mouth — to its duster cans. That bitterant became one leg of a three-part industry strategy, alongside warning labels and lobbying for propellants to be formally classified as inhalable hazards. States responded too: through the 1990s, many passed inhalant-specific criminal statutes restricting sales to minors, part of a wave of “forgotten epidemic” attention that peaked around National Inhalants and Poisons Awareness Week, which started in 1995. Then, like most drug-panic news cycles, it faded — coverage moved on, the laws sat unenforced, and the products stayed exactly where they’d always been, on the shelf, unrestricted, unwatched.

The lawsuit against the duster makers argues the bitterant wasn’t just insufficient — it may have made things more dangerous. The complaint alleges denatonium benzoate can act as a bronchodilator, meaning it may actually help open airways and push more vapor deeper into the lungs of a person actively inhaling to get high, even as it does nothing to stop them. And the regulatory record backs up the “insufficient” half of that story on its own: on July 31, 2024, the Consumer Product Safety Commission finalized a rule, published in the Federal Register, capping how much HFC-152a and HFC-134a — the two propellant chemicals most commonly abused for their intoxicating effect — a duster can is allowed to contain, at just 18 milligrams combined. A federal safety agency spent three decades watching a voluntary industry fix fail before it wrote a binding limit into law. Falcon’s own materials acknowledge the bitterant “appears not to have led to a decline in deaths and injuries” — which is the industry’s own history conceding, in its own words, that the thing it built to solve this didn’t.

What Coverage Gaps Cost

Rize exists to help people find treatment, and treatment coverage in the media tends to follow the drug that’s making headlines: fentanyl, xylazine, whatever synthetic is driving that quarter’s overdose numbers. Inhalants don’t make headlines, because there’s no villain shaped like a cartel or a pharma executive — just a supply chain that runs through every hardware and office store in the country, and a public-health hole nobody’s filled. That invisibility is not neutral. It means parents don’t know what to watch for. It means treatment providers underprepare for it. It means a 31-year-old veteran can spend two and a half months and $4,433.74 on a legal product before anyone intervenes, and it means when the worst happens, there’s no rescue drug to reach for.

Tonight, if you’re worried about your own use or someone else’s, that’s still true regardless of how little anyone talks about it: you can call or text 988 and say the word “inhalants” out loud to a real person, and a treatment locator can point you toward help that understands this specific substance class, not just the ones with more press. Michael Robins didn’t die because inhalants are rare or exotic. He died because they’re ordinary — sold next to the printer paper, unregulated for decades, bitter-tasting and still lethal, killing quietly enough that almost nobody outside a Georgia courtroom ever had to hear his name.