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Flavored nitrous oxide is the newest drug to sweep America’s youth — and it sounds like folks are already developing debilitating addictions and alarming side effects.
As New York Magazine reports, the “Galaxy Gas” brand has become synonymous with the latest generation of nitrous oxide that’s readily available at smoke shops and online.
With longer highs, candy-esque flavors, and little legal restriction, the chemical formerly known as “whippets” or “nitrous” involves huffing the gas into one’s lungs to achieve a brief head rush.
Though whippets have long been popular among hippie-ish subcultures, the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 breathed new life into the market for the barely-regulated chemical as it’s gone viral on TikTok. As more and more people began to seek out the escape provided by a nitrous rush, however, chronic users are reporting all kinds of freaky side effects.
An employee who works at an Atlanta-area smoke shop called Cloud 9, which is run by a family that created the Galaxy Gas brand and owned it until October of 2024, told NYMag that he’d see people come in multiple times a day to purchase canisters and even tanks of nitrous. Upon returning, many would have limps, tremors, and be slurring their words.
Eventually, the employee began lying to customers and telling them the location was sold out of Galaxy Gas even when they weren’t, out of fear of someone hurting themselves or others while using the drug — a salient concern given that last month, a Georgia driver was sued for fatally running down a cyclist while huffing the branded gas.
Nitrous oxide has generally fallen into the category of drugs seen as “risky, but survivable in moderation.” But some combination of availability and adulterants seem to be pushing it into more harmful territory.
For Kiersytn Milligan, a 25-year-old tattoo artist from Texas who got hooked on nitrous, the results were almost as dire. After encountering the drug at a party, the young woman soon began using it all the time on her own — so much so that her local smoke shop developed a deal for her where she would get one tank free after purchasing five.
“My life consisted of huffing whippets alone 24 hours a day,” Milligan told NYMag. “I couldn’t breathe without it. If I had about five minutes without it, my heart would start palpitating.”
Not long after getting deep into nitrous use, the tattoo artist began to lose her hair. Later, she lost the ability to walk and control her bodily functions, including bowel movements, and had frequent seizures. After four car accidents and a total loss of motor control, Milligan’s grandmother took her to the hospital, where she was met with tragic news: she was paralyzed, and had blood clots in her lungs and a cyst in her brain.
According to Grace, another former Cloud 9 franchise employee who spoke to NYMag using a pseudonym, the bigger Galaxy Gas got, the weirder things became in the shop.
“The people that are coming in asking for it, they’re getting younger and younger,” she told the magazine. “You could see that they were out of it; you could barely understand what they were saying.”
As NYMag explains, Galaxy Gas was quietly sold to an undisclosed buyer last fall after a rash of bad press about its explosive popularity and side effects.
And there are still lots of other dupes available online and in stores, which means that so-called “gas heads” can still get their fix of the damaging chemical, even if it’s not from their preferred brand.
More on galaxy gas: Astrophysicist Surprised to Learn Why Her TikTok on “Galaxy Gas” Was Suddenly Blowing Up