Whippets Are Still Legal Everywhere, and the Death Toll Just Went Up 578%

Trenton Geiger inhaled nitrous oxide from a Whip-It canister, blacked out behind the wheel, and drove into Marissa Politte as she walked out of her workplace in 2020, pushing her into the building she’d just left. She died there. This summer, a Missouri jury put a number on what led to that moment: $745 million, with United Brands Product Design — the company that distributes Whip-It brand canisters — found 70% liable, the smoke shop that sold the canister 20% liable, and Geiger himself 10% liable.

Nitrous oxide is the only widely misused inhalant in America that federal law still treats as a kitchen ingredient.

If you’ve watched someone huff a canister at a party and thought “that’s not even a real drug,” you’re describing exactly the gap that let this happen. It is a real drug — a dissociative anesthetic gas that starves the brain of oxygen and, with heavy or repeated use, burns through the body’s B12 stores fast enough to cause nerve damage that can leave people unable to walk. It’s just not scheduled like one.

The number that should have triggered a scheduling review

A research letter published in JAMA Network Open by R. Andrew Yockey of the University of Mississippi and Rachel Hoopsick of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign counted every U.S. death attributable to nitrous oxide poisoning between 2010 and 2023: 1,240 total, climbing from 23 in the first year of the study to 156 in the last — a 578% increase, with roughly three-quarters of those deaths landing in just the final seven years. That’s not a slow drift. That’s a curve bending upward in real time, tracking almost exactly with the years that “Galaxy Gas”-style flavored canisters — sold in colors and scents aimed at recreational users, not chefs whipping cream — showed up on smoke shop counters and gas station racks nationwide.

Here’s the plain version of why the number climbed: whipped-cream chargers used to come in small 8-gram cartridges meant for kitchen dispensers. The newer products are sold in tanks that hold the equivalent of dozens or hundreds of those cartridges, marketed with flavor names and bright packaging that have nothing to do with cooking, and sold specifically at the retailers — vape shops, smoke shops, gas stations — where a “culinary” justification stretches thin. The FDA issued a public advisory in March 2025 naming Galaxy Gas and similar brands directly, warning that misuse can cause psychiatric symptoms, blood clots, paralysis, and death, and expanded the warning to cover additional brands three months later. The advisory changed nothing about the products’ legal status. Nitrous oxide for “food preparation” remains exempt from DEA scheduling, which means the same canister sold to a bakery and the one sold to a 19-year-old outside a gas station are, on paper, the identical unregulated product.

Why nobody’s proposed scheduling it

Every other drug this newsroom covers regularly — opioids, stimulants, psychedelics, even kratom’s 7-OH derivative — sits somewhere on a federal schedule, which at minimum means the FDA and DEA have a formal lever to pull. Nitrous oxide’s exemption exists because the same molecule genuinely is used in dentistry, in commercial kitchens, and in emergency medicine, at doses and delivery methods nothing like a party balloon. Scheduling the compound itself would sweep in every dental office and coffee shop whipped-cream dispenser in the country. That’s the real policy bind, and it’s why the regulatory response has landed, messily, at the state and local level instead: Tennessee passed a law fining retailers for recreational nitrous sales, effective this past July. Orange County and Newport Beach, California made recreational sale a local misdemeanor. Neither approach touches the online marketplace where most of this actually moves — which is why, in February, a group of injured consumers sued Amazon and more than a dozen nitrous brands in Washington state court, arguing the “culinary use” label was cover for marketing a product everyone involved knew was headed straight into someone’s lungs, not a mixing bowl.

Orange County and Newport Beach, California made recreational sale a local misdemeanor.

The Politte verdict is the first time a jury has put a dollar figure on that argument and had it stick. Product liability suits move slower than legislation and only reach the people who happen to sue — they’re a consequence, not a prevention strategy. But they’re currently doing more to constrain how these products get marketed than any federal regulator has managed to do.

The pattern isn’t new — we’ve just renamed the gas

We have been here before with a substance regulators couldn’t cleanly schedule because it had a legitimate use nobody wanted to ban. Cough syrup containing dextromethorphan sat exempt from scheduling for decades for exactly this reason — it’s a real, useful over-the-counter medicine — while a parallel market in “robo-tripping” grew around the same bottles, and it took years of ER data and state-by-state age-restriction laws before purchase limits caught up with what pharmacists already knew was happening at the register. Whippets are that story again, compressed into a decade instead of three: a product with an undeniable legitimate use, a recreational market growing in plain sight around it, and a regulatory system built to schedule molecules, not marketing.

If you or someone you’re with is going to use nitrous oxide recreationally, the harm-reduction basics are unglamorous but true: never inhale directly from a pressurized tank or with a mask covering your nose and mouth — that combination is what causes fatal oxygen deprivation, not the gas alone; never use it standing up, driving, or alone; and heavy repeated use over weeks or months, not just a single session, is what causes the B12-deficiency nerve damage that shows up as tingling, numbness, or trouble walking. None of that requires the DEA to act. It requires the information to actually reach the person holding the canister, which right now, on a product still marketed as “culinary,” it mostly doesn’t.

Marissa Politte didn’t do anything with nitrous oxide. She was walking out of work. The $745 million verdict doesn’t undo that, and it won’t scale to every canister sold this year at a gas station register. What it does is put a real number next to a product that has, until now, mostly avoided having one — and it puts the states still debating a local ordinance on notice that the “it’s just for whipped cream” defense has a jury-tested price tag now.