A Flavored Canister Is Killing More People Every Year, and the Law Is Only Now Catching Up

Renna O’Rourke was 19 years old when she inhaled from a can of computer-duster spray, the kind sold in any office-supply aisle to blow crumbs off a keyboard. Here is the plain version of what happened before the clinical name for it: the chemical in that can made her heart so sensitive to her own adrenaline that an ordinary jolt of it, the kind your body produces just from being startled, was enough to throw her heart into a fatal rhythm. She spent a week on life support in the ICU at HonorHealth Scottsdale Osborn before she died in 2025. Doctors call it sudden sniffing death syndrome, and it can happen on a first try, not just after a long history of use.

Renna’s death is why Arizona lawmakers introduced HB 2191, folding nitrous oxide and poppers into the state’s inhalant-control law and making recreational sale or use a felony. Arizona was one of 22 states with no such law, and her parents are now pushing legislators to treat a product most people still see as a party gag, not a killer.

A product marketed like candy is now killing people at a rate that would be a scandal in almost any other drug category.

That’s the story worth sitting with. Not because nitrous oxide is new. Dentists have used it safely for over a century, and whipped-cream chargers have sat in kitchen drawers for decades. What’s new is the scale, the marketing, and the speed at which a regulatory system built for a different era is trying to catch up.

The Numbers Are Moving in One Direction, Fast

Start with Michigan, the only state with detailed, published surveillance data. A CDC field report tracking nitrous oxide cases from 2019 to 2023 found poison-center calls rose from 10 to 48, emergency department visits rose from 7 to 60, and EMS responses rose from 15 to 78 in just four years. Of those 192 EMS responses, 14 involved a death, including three that investigators believe were suicides. That’s one state, one agency’s caseload, and the trend line looks nearly vertical.

Zoom out to the national picture and it’s worse. A team led by researchers at the University of Mississippi analyzed 14 years of CDC mortality data and published the results in JAMA Network Open: nitrous oxide deaths climbed from 23 in 2010 to 156 in 2023, a 578% increase. The study’s lead researcher points to something specific as part of the driver: flavored nozzles and canisters, sold under brand names like Galaxy Gas in flavors such as bubblegum and mango, engineered in a way that reads as marketing toward younger users rather than the culinary professionals the product is nominally sold to.

The people using it are not a fringe. A national medRxiv preprint estimates roughly 1 in 20 U.S. adults have used nitrous recreationally at some point, and among people whose only inhalant is nitrous oxide, about 1 in 10 who used it in the past year meet clinical criteria for an inhalant use disorder, meaning their use has crossed into a pattern that’s compulsive and hard for them to control on their own, not just occasional. Nationally, NIDA estimates 335,000 Americans age 12 and older had an inhalant use disorder in 2021, and that regular inhalant use produces measurable cognitive impairment, problems with memory, attention, and processing speed, in 50% to 80% of people who use heavily and consistently.

What Actually Happens Inside Your Body

If you’re using inhalants, or you love someone who is, here’s the mechanism in plain terms, because almost nobody explains it before naming it.

Nitrous oxide and hydrocarbon solvents like the difluoroethane in duster spray are chemically different, but they can both kill through variations on the same basic failure. Difluoroethane and similar solvents make the heart hypersensitive to adrenaline. That’s the mechanism behind Renna’s death, and behind what’s clinically termed sudden sniffing death syndrome: your body’s own fight-or-flight surge, triggered by something as ordinary as a sudden noise, becomes the thing that kills you, because the heart’s electrical rhythm short-circuits into cardiac arrest. California Poison Control has documented this happening on a person’s first use, with no warning signs beforehand.

California Poison Control has documented this happening on a person’s first use, with no warning signs beforehand.

Nitrous oxide’s most immediate danger runs through a different but related door: your blood and lungs can only carry so much gas at once, and nitrous displaces the oxygen that would otherwise be there. Use it in a car, a closet, with a bag over your head, or in rapid succession without breaks, and you can pass out and suffocate before anyone realizes something is wrong. Heavier, repeated use adds a slower harm on top of that acute risk: nitrous depletes vitamin B12 in a way that can damage the nerves in your hands and feet and, in some cases, your spinal cord, producing numbness, weakness, and difficulty walking that doesn’t always fully reverse.

You don’t have to have a substance use history for this to apply to you. Sudden sniffing death syndrome has killed first-time users, athletes, teenagers experimenting once at a party. There’s no dose that’s guaranteed safe, and there’s no version of tolerance that protects you the way it might with other substances.

This Isn’t the First Time a Legal High Outran Regulation

This isn’t the first time a legal chemical got recreational before anyone caught up. In the late 1960s and ’70s, headlines panicked over teenagers sniffing airplane glue and aerosol paint out of paper bags, a cheap high hiding in plain sight on hardware store shelves for years before any warning label. A decade later, on disco dance floors, amyl nitrite, sold openly under names like Rush as a “room deodorizer,” became so normalized it was practically part of the scene’s furniture before regulators treated it as a drug worth controlling. Both times, the pattern was identical: a product built for something else got repurposed for a high, spread by word of mouth faster than any law could move, and only drew serious attention once the body count made the question impossible to ignore. Galaxy Gas is that same story in fruit-scented packaging.

The Regulation Is Patchwork, and So Is the Help

States are moving now, unevenly and mostly after the fact. South Carolina passed a law this year banning recreational nitrous sales outright. Arizona’s HB 2191 would close its own gap by adding nitrous oxide and poppers to the existing inhalant statute, with felony penalties for recreational sale and use. What neither bill does is fund treatment, fund research, or tell anyone who’s already using how to reduce their risk right now, tonight, before the next law takes effect.

That gap matters, and it deserves to be said plainly rather than glossed over: inhalant harm reduction is genuinely under-researched and under-resourced compared to what exists for opioids or alcohol. Peer-reviewed research on online communities where people discuss nitrous oxide has found that users have organized their own informal harm-reduction culture, sharing advice on dosing limits, not combining nitrous with alcohol, and supplementing B12, because the formal public health system hasn’t caught up with guidance that’s specific, current, and easy to find. People are teaching each other in forums because clinicians, largely, aren’t teaching them anything at all.

That’s not a reason to shrug. It’s a reason Rize exists.

If you or someone you love is using nitrous oxide, duster spray, or any inhalant, know the warning signs of sudden sniffing death syndrome: a racing or irregular heartbeat, chest pain, fainting, or confusion after use, especially combined with any physical startle or exertion. That combination is an emergency. Call 911, and if you need guidance on what’s happening in the body, Poison Control (1-800-222-1222) is staffed around the clock and won’t require you to identify yourself.

Renna O’Rourke’s parents didn’t get a second chance to have that week back. What they have now is a bill with her name behind it, and a story they keep telling so that the next kid holding a flavored canister at a party has one more reason to put it down.

Renna O’Rourke’s parents didn’t get a second chance to have that week back.