Laughing Gas Is Killing More People Than Ever, and Treating It as a Joke Is Why

Kelly Rosenthal’s brother hadn’t heard from her in two days when he called for a welfare check. She was found alone in her Nashville apartment on June 23, surrounded by spent nitrous oxide canisters — the kind sold for whipping cream, bought by the case. Months earlier, she’d sat for an interview about her addiction, describing an apartment filling up with “trash of the little canister things” and admitting that even brain surgery hadn’t stopped her from going back to it. “I was aware it was crazy,” she said, “but I didn’t care. I was still so addicted to it.” Her best friend, Katie Snow, put the accessibility problem plainly: “You just can walk into any smoke shop if you’re over 21 and ask for it. When it’s so accessible, it’s almost impossible to overcome.”

Rosenthal’s death is not an outlier anymore. It’s a data point on a curve that is bending sharply upward.

Nitrous oxide is not a harmless party gag — it is disabling and, with rising frequency, killing the people who’ve been told it’s not a real drug.

A national mortality study published in JAMA Network Open in July 2025 found that nitrous oxide-related deaths in the US climbed from 23 in 2010 to 156 in 2023 — a 578% increase, with nearly three-quarters of the 1,240 deaths recorded over that period occurring in just the last seven years. Researchers Andrew Yockey and Rachel Hoopsick pulled the numbers from CDC death-certificate surveillance data, which is a real strength — it’s national, and it’s consistent year over year — but it’s also the study’s built-in blind spot. Nitrous deaths get coded in inconsistent ways (asphyxiation, cardiac arrest, unspecified poisoning), which means the true toll is almost certainly higher than what shows up in a mortality database, and the number says nothing about the much larger population who survive with permanent nerve damage. Read the full study, or its open-access version, and the trend line is the least ambiguous part of it: the increase is real, it’s accelerating, and it is being met with almost no public health infrastructure built to catch it.

The joke framing is doing real damage, and the data backs that up

Nitrous oxide has a nickname problem. “Whip-its.” “Hippy crack.” “Laughing gas.” Every name minimizes it, and the minimizing isn’t harmless — it’s the reason people don’t get help until they’re already hurt. The Michigan Poison & Drug Information Center tracked 112 cases of recreational nitrous oxide misuse tied primarily to neurological injury between January 2024 and mid-May 2026: 35 cases in 2024, 47 in 2025, and 30 more in the first four and a half months of 2026 alone — a curve that isn’t flattening. Ninety-nine of those 112 people ended up in a hospital. Thirty-eight were admitted. Ten needed intensive care. Most were between 20 and 39 — not teenagers experimenting once at a party, but adults using regularly enough to do lasting harm.

What’s actually happening to the body, explained without the jargon

Here’s the part that gets lost under the punchline: nitrous oxide doesn’t just make you high and then let go. It shuts off vitamin B12 in your body — doctors call this B12 inactivation, meaning the gas chemically disables the B12 you already have, so your body can’t use it even if your blood levels look normal. B12 is what your nervous system needs to keep the fatty insulation around your nerve fibers — called myelin — intact. Without functioning B12, that insulation breaks down, starting in the spinal cord. The medical name for the result is subacute combined degeneration of the spinal cord, or myeloneuropathy — plainly: creeping nerve damage in your spinal cord that starts as numbness and tingling in your hands and feet, progresses to trouble walking and balance problems, and in heavy, sustained use can become permanent weakness or paralysis. This is not a rare fluke reaction. It’s a well-documented, mechanistic consequence of repeated exposure, and it can happen to people who would never think of themselves as having “a drug problem,” because the substance never asked them to.

B12 is what your nervous system needs to keep the fatty insulation around your nerve fibers — called myelin — intact.

If you’re using nitrous regularly — daily, or even a few times a week — and you’ve noticed tingling in your fingers or feet, trouble with balance, or a kind of clumsiness that wasn’t there before, that is not a sign to wait it out. It’s a sign to get your B12 and neurological function checked now, while it’s still likely treatable. This isn’t a moral failing you have to confess before you’re allowed to get care; it’s a chemistry problem that has a name and a workup.

This isn’t a new trick — it’s an old one wearing a new label

This is where nitrous oxide fits an older pattern, not a new one. In the 1970s and ’80s, amyl nitrite — “poppers” — became a fixture of club and gay nightlife, sold openly as “room odorizer” or “leather cleaner” to dodge drug law. When the Consumer Products Safety Commission banned butyl nitrite in 1988, manufacturers didn’t stop selling poppers — they tweaked the chemical formula and the label and kept going, a cycle that repeated for decades. Whipped-cream chargers are running the same play today: the product is legitimately industrial and culinary, which is exactly what lets branded, candy-flavored, party-sized canisters get sold at gas stations and vape shops as a novelty rather than a drug. The chemistry changes: solvents, nitrites, now nitrous. The playbook — sell it as something else, stay one label ahead of the scheduling — doesn’t.

Bans are the easy move, and they’re not the right one

States have noticed the death toll and are legislating fast: Louisiana banned recreational retail sales of nitrous oxide gas in 2024, Michigan followed the same year, and Oklahoma passed the “Maddix Bias Act” in 2025 after a nitrous-impaired driving death. Reason Foundation’s analysis argues these bans are largely symbolic — nitrous oxide has too many legitimate commercial uses to actually disappear from shelves, and a retail ban does nothing for someone already using heavily, doesn’t fund a single B12 test or neurology referral, and doesn’t touch the reason a stressed, anxious, or already-struggling person reaches for a cheap, legal, fast-acting dissociative in the first place. A ban treats the canister as the problem. The person holding it needs something a ban can’t provide: a reason to name what’s happening as use, not a joke, and somewhere to go with that.

That “not a real drug” framing is doing exactly what it sounds like — letting people avoid identifying as having a substance problem until the damage is done and permanent, because nobody handed them off-ramp language for something legally sold next to the whipped cream. Early findings out of Melbourne, Australia — a genuinely different regulatory and healthcare context, so treat this as international signal rather than a US data point — describe emergency psychiatrists at a Western Health hospital seeing a rising number of nitrous oxide users present with psychosis-like symptoms: delusions, disorganized thinking, suicidality, in patients as young as 16, some reporting up to 100 canisters a day. It’s a different health system and a different drug supply, but the underlying signal rhymes with what US poison centers are seeing: heavy, repeated use of something people were told wasn’t serious enough to log as a real drug problem.

Not every nitrous oxide death looks like slow nerve damage — some, like 17-year-old Jack Schoenig’s in State College, Pennsylvania, are acute: a single session where the gas displaces oxygen fast enough to cause asphyxiation on the spot, no chronic use required. Both endings — sudden and cumulative — start from the same premise: that this one, sold in a bright can with a candy flavor, doesn’t count. This category belongs in the same conversation as other inhalants, not off in its own “not a real drug” lane, and the response that actually helps looks more like harm reduction built for something people don’t yet believe is dangerous, than like a shelf ban.

Both endings — sudden and cumulative — start from the same premise: that this one, sold in a bright can with a candy flavor, doesn’t count.

Here’s what’s still true and worth holding onto: B12 depletion from nitrous misuse is treatable, especially caught early — a person can get a blood test, start supplementation, and in many cases stop or significantly limit further nerve damage. The tragedy in these cases isn’t that the biology was unknowable. It’s that the joke got there first.