Nitrous Oxide Deaths Rose Nearly 600% While Regulators Treated Galaxy Gas Like a Whipped-Cream Ingredient

Galaxy Gas comes in mango smoothie, strawberry cream, and vanilla cupcake. The canisters are candy-colored, and social media is full of clips of people cracking one open in a parking lot or a car and inhaling straight from the nozzle. The label calls it a whipped cream charger. Almost nobody buying it is making whipped cream.

Between 2010 and 2023, nitrous oxide misuse killed 1,240 people in the United States. The annual death toll climbed from 23 to 156 — a nearly 600% increase — according to a study published July 31, 2025 in JAMA Network Open by R. Andrew Yockey, PhD, of the University of Mississippi, and Rachel Hoopsick, PhD, MPH, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Seventy-four percent of those deaths happened in just the most recent seven years of the study window.

The chemistry of nitrous oxide didn’t change over that period. The marketing did.

What Nitrous Oxide Actually Does to a Body

Nitrous oxide — laughing gas, the stuff dentists use and the stuff in whipped cream chargers — produces a brief high by displacing the oxygen you’d normally breathe and disconnecting your sense of self from physical sensation. That’s what “dissociative” means in practice: you’re conscious, but mind and body feel unlinked. In small, occasional, medically supervised doses, that’s unremarkable. Inhaled repeatedly and in volume, the same reaction destroys the body’s ability to use vitamin B12: nitrous oxide oxidizes B12’s active core into a form the body can’t use, and without usable B12, the fatty insulation around nerves breaks down. Clinicians call the result subacute combined degeneration of the spinal cord — in plain terms, tingling and numbness in the hands and feet that can progress to trouble walking and, in severe cases, paralysis. Case literature indexed by the National Library of Medicine documents this repeatedly in recreational users. Straight nitrous, undiluted with oxygen, can also cause fatal hypoxia in a single sitting — no repeated use required.

A Regulatory Gap Built for a Kitchen Product, Not a Drug

Yockey and Hoopsick point to a specific driver: aggressive marketing of repackaged, flavored nitrous products leaning on a loophole that treats them as food-grade whipped cream chargers rather than drugs of misuse. Galaxy Gas is the best-known brand, but “Exotic Whip” and over a dozen similarly named products run the same playbook. In March 2025, the FDA issued a consumer advisory naming Galaxy Gas and more than a dozen other brands directly, warning that inhaling any flavor from any canister can cause paralysis, psychiatric symptoms, blood clots, and death — sold, the agency noted, on Amazon, eBay, Walmart, and at ordinary gas stations. Lawsuits followed, including a February 2026 case against Amazon and more than a dozen nitrous manufacturers alleging the companies flavored and packaged products to appeal to teenagers while marketing them as harmless kitchen supplies. It isn’t the first household chemical to slip past scheduling because it also has a legitimate use elsewhere — paint thinner, computer-duster spray, and glue have evaded controlled-substance status the same way for decades. Nitrous oxide is the newest one, with a social-media growth engine the older inhalants never had.

If you or someone close to you is inhaling nitrous recreationally, the warning signs aren’t subtle once you know what you’re looking for: tingling or numbness in fingers and toes with no other explanation, an unsteady walk, or a stash of flavored canisters that have nothing to do with dessert.

The Law Is Starting to Catch Up, State by State

As of the study’s July 2025 publication, four states — Alabama, California, Michigan, and Louisiana — had banned recreational nitrous sales outright, and others, including New York, restrict sales to adults 21 and older. Tennessee joined the list this year: a law signed by Gov. Bill Lee bans retail sale of nitrous oxide products statewide effective July 1, 2026, makes knowingly selling it for intoxication a Class E felony, and sets penalties of $2,500 for a first violation and $5,000 for repeat offenses, with repeat violators risking license revocation. The law followed a local investigative series and the death of a Nashville woman whose family pushed for the change. It’s a patchwork response to a national trend, and there is still no federal restriction on culinary-labeled nitrous sold to adults.

It’s a patchwork response to a national trend, and there is still no federal restriction on culinary-labeled nitrous sold to adults.

What the Data Can’t Tell You Yet

Hoopsick and Yockey’s own numbers carry a wrinkle worth sitting with: their statistical modeling found the sharpest annual increase — about 24.5% a year — ran from 2010 to 2018, then plateaued without statistical significance from 2019 to 2023. The overall 600% rise is real, and 74% of all deaths still landed in the last seven years, but the most recent trend line is flatter than the headline number implies. The study also leans on death certificates, which undercount the real toll two ways: they say nothing about people who suffer nerve damage or addiction without dying, and they only capture a nitrous-involved death when a coroner specifically tests for and codes the gas — inconsistent practice across jurisdictions. The link between marketing volume and death rate is also correlational, not causal; the authors describe a trend that lines up with the rise of viral nitrous brands, not a controlled experiment proving the marketing caused the deaths.

Any provider seeing a patient with unexplained tingling, gait changes, or mood symptoms with no clear cause has a cheap move available this week: ask directly about nitrous use, and order a B12 and methylmalonic acid panel before assuming a psychiatric cause. It’s a two-minute question that catches damage while it’s still reversible.

Rize’s science and medicine coverage tracks studies like this as they publish; our inhalants resource hub covers nitrous oxide alongside other household products people misuse. The Galaxy Gas can in a teenager’s car isn’t a kitchen supply that got misused by accident. It’s a drug product wearing a food label, and the death certificates are the only paperwork that call it what it is.