She Spent $300 to $400 a Day on a Whipped-Cream Gas. We Still Sell It Like That.

Meg Caldwell was 29 and living near Orlando when she died in November outside a vape shop, the place where she had just bought nitrous oxide. Her sister, Leigh, told Atlanta’s WSB-TV that Meg started using it recreationally in college, and that by the end she would “spend $300, $400 at a smoke shop in a day.” A hospital doctor had already said the sentence nobody wants to hear about their sister: “This is going to kill you. You’re going to die.” The addiction, Leigh said, had left Meg incontinent and, at one point, temporarily unable to use her legs. “Her whole life had become derailed due to her addiction to this drug.”

We regulate this gas as a baking supply and bury the people it breaks as if they chose it.

That is the take, and it is arguable, so here is the case. Nitrous oxide is sold in canisters marketed for whipped cream. The FDA looked at the market in March 2025 and advised consumers not to inhale it from canisters, tanks, or chargers of any size, citing a rise in adverse-event reports. An advisory is a request. According to a May 2026 fact sheet from the Legislative Analysis and Public Policy Association, the chargers still turn up in vape shops and gas stations, and reports of intentional nitrous exposure rose 58 percent from 2023 to 2024. So the canister that sits near a register can be the same product a doctor told Meg Caldwell would kill her.

The numbers are small, which is exactly the problem

In July 2025, Andrew Yockey of the University of Mississippi and Rachel Hoopsick of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign published a study in JAMA Network Open using 14 years of CDC data. As HealthDay reported, deaths linked to nitrous oxide misuse rose 578 percent between 2010 and 2023: from about 23 a year to 156. Put plainly, that is 156 families in one year. Yockey said it himself: “The numbers are still small right now, but they’re growing and they’re growing fast. And it absolutely deserves national surveillance.”

A small count is also why a drug gets ignored. Nobody builds a program around 156 deaths. Nobody gets a grant. The people who show up to emergency rooms, in the words of Dr. Gaylord Lopez of the Georgia Poison Center, are often adults who blacked out or lost consciousness, and chronic use, he said, starves the brain and heart of oxygen. His center’s nitrous calls went from three in 2019 to 22 in 2024. That is a small number too. It is also a seven-fold climb in five years, in one state, at one poison center.

The study carries limits worth stating. It counts deaths, so it counts people who died and misses the far larger group who stopped breathing, got up, and went back for another canister. It says nothing about how many people use nitrous and are fine. What it shows is a direction, and a direction is what you want before the count gets big.

Why it holds on to people the way it does

If you have ever chased a feeling that lasted under a minute, you already understand the loop better than any textbook explains it. Nitrous oxide works fast and wears off fast, which means the reward arrives, vanishes, and the craving to repeat it starts almost immediately. Meg’s $300 to $400 a day is what that loop looks like when it has a cash register and a lunch hour. The plain version: the thing you want is always forty feet away, and it never makes you wait long enough to change your mind.

That is also why the usual advice fails here. Kim Castro, a drug addiction specialist in metro Atlanta, told WSB that she has had clients crash cars while inhaling nitrous and that four of her clients have died of nitrous oxide poisoning. One overdosed in a hotel room with about 30 canisters around him and later died roughly six months after leaving treatment. Most treatment conversations start from a list of substances, and a gas sold for whipped cream is rarely on the list.

Most treatment conversations start from a list of substances, and a gas sold for whipped cream is rarely on the list.

Same gas, a respectable room

None of this is new, and the history is the part worth carrying around. In 1799 in Bristol, England, a physician named Thomas Beddoes ran the Pneumatic Institution to test the medical effects of newly discovered gases, and a young chemist named Humphry Davy, per the Public Domain Review, found that pure nitrous oxide could be breathed and then breathed it himself several times a day. Evening sessions in the drawing room drew poets and surgeons. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was at the time hiding a growing opium addiction, wrote that he felt “more unmingled pleasure than I had ever before experienced.” The room was respectable and the reason was science. The gas was understood as a curiosity, then as an entertainment, and the question of who it was hurting came much later. More than two centuries on, the gas has moved from the drawing room to the gas-station shelf, and the reason is still that it looks harmless.

What to do with this

The class action Meg’s family has filed against nitrous oxide manufacturers and seven Florida smoke shops, according to the reporting, aims to stop retail sales of the drug. Their attorney said it is not a wrongful death case. The family wants the sale to stop. You can argue about whether litigation is the right instrument, but you cannot argue they are wrong about the problem.

If you work in treatment, this is a question for your next team meeting: does your intake form ask about gas canisters, chargers, or whippets by name, or only about the substances on the standard list? A person who never says “inhalant” may say “I get them at the smoke shop.” Ask that way. Add a line to the screening script this week, and agree on who on your team follows up when someone mentions leg weakness, numbness, or loss of bladder control, because those were part of Meg’s story.

If you are the person who uses it, or the person who loves one: you are not weak, and the shame is not a plan. Poison Help (1-800-222-1222) answers around the clock and is a door that is still open tonight. The SAMHSA Helpline and 988 are listed below.

Meg Caldwell was 29. Her sister said her name to a reporter so that the next person at the register has a reason to put the canister down.