What ‘hippie crack’ is doing to you
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Laughing gas doing its thing with a reveller.
Source: News Corp Australia
IT is a drug more popular than cocaine and ecstasy and deemed so dangerous that organisers of one of the world’s biggest music festivals wrote an open letter urging punters to steer clear of it.
It goes by the street names “nangers”, “nangs”, “whippets” and “hippie crack” but you might know it simply as laughing gas.
That’s right, the stuff dentists use to sedate their patients is being inhaled in such a quantity that the Glastonbury music festival banned it this year.
But how bad is it? A serious health risk or a lot of hot air?
Drug experts have taken a harder line on laughing gas — or nitrous oxide — in the UK where it has gained popularity. Britons use it for a legal high at nightclubs, parties and music festivals because it’s “dirt cheap” and believed to be relatively safe.
But 17 people are believed to have died after inhaling laughing gas in the UK alone. Young chef Jordan Guise died in France in February last year after experimenting with the drug.
Closer to home, Jessica Murray, 23, and Tolson Dimovski, 38, died 10 years earlier after experimenting with laughing gas in a vehicle in Sydney.
Jessica Murray died over an overdose.
Source: News Limited
Jordan Guise died from a legal high.
Source: Facebook
Professor Jake Najman, director of the Alcohol and Drug Research and Education Centre at the University of Queensland, said in 2013 that nitrous oxide was “dirt cheap”, legal and readily available.
“It’s a small world … if there are kids using (nitrous oxide) in the UK this is going to sort of sweep a lot of world you would think. It’s something that is likely to come here,” Prof Najman said.
“It’s a perfectly legal product, that’s the problem.”
Harry Shapiro, director of information at DrugScope, told the Huffington Post last year that the dangers of nitrous oxide are directly linked to the way people use it.
“Some people will be inhaling it out of plastic bags and masks so you can restrict your air supply and asphyxiate from lack of oxygen,” he said.
Other experts, including Alistair Bohm from Addaction, say inhaling laughing gas through a balloon is relatively safe.
Statistics in the UK show that 350,000 young people reported using the drug at a festival or a music event in a single year. Those numbers are nothing new to Liz Eliot, the woman in charge of running a safe Glastonbury music festival that remains true to its roots — “a place where people can gather in peace for fun and spiritual awakenings”.
In a letter to festival-goers posted online today, Ms Eliot said it was time for organisers to “reclaim” King’s Meadow where the festival takes place.
“Sadly the King’s Meadow has lost its way,” she wrote.
Two tonnes of nitrous oxide canisters were recovered from Glastonbury last year.
Source: News Corp Australia
“It’s become known as a place where people take nitrous oxide, a damaging drug which pollutes our beautiful field with noise, litter and N2O gas (a greenhouse gas which is 298 times more polluting than carbon dioxide). Nitrous oxide is also dangerous: an exploding canister was the source of a major injury at last year’s Glastonbury.
“It breaks our hearts to see our Sacred Space used this way — and we know from many messages we’ve received over the last few years that lots of you feel the same way.”
She said two tonnes of laughing gas canisters were collected after the festival in 2014.
“Help us — please do not bring nitrous oxide onto the site and support us by not using it in the King’s Meadow.”
A Home Office campaign last year on the risks of legal highs showed that laughing gas was the second-most popular drug among young adults in 2013-14 after cannabis.
