DOSE:

repeated

inhaled

Nitrous Oxide

(gas)

BODY WEIGHT:

250 lb

[Reported Dose: "24-116 chargers or more per sitting 2-5 times per week or more for about 3 years"]

I started huffing whip-its in 2006, the year I turned 30. What started as a weekend habit turned into much more, and I soon began huffing 1-4 boxes of chargers (24 chargers per box) in the space of 1-2 hours per sitting. At first, I would get really nauseous as I got close to finishing one box, but over time I developed a tolerance.

The high felt good, there are plenty of other well-written trip reports describing how the high feels, so I won't go into that so much. One thing I did note after using N20 for about a year is that there's a short-term 'mental' high, and then there's a low-level body high that develops after the first box, and lasted for about 10-15 minutes after I stopped.

I continued huffing nitrous at least a couple times a week, and after about two and a half years I started developing extreme fatigue, clumsiness, and a loss of sensation in my extremities . The loss of feeling in my feet and hands and the fatigue kept getting worse and worse, as I went from blood test after blood test to neurologist and nerve conduction study to MRI after MRI. It was clear that I had multiple neuropathies (loss of electrical signal from the brain to my hands and feet), and if it wasn't developing so slowly it would have resembled the deadly Guillen-Barre syndrome or Parkinson's or severe MS to a 'T'. But it was happening slowly.

Finally my neurologist ordered a functional (video instead of photographic) MRI of my neck (C-spine), and that's where they found the problem. A severe vitamin B12 deficiency in my tissues (my B12 blood levels had been normal multiple times) had caused at least 8 lesions on my spinal cord, where the myelin sheath that insulates the spinal cord so that it doesn't lose electrical signal had worn away at the points where it rubbed against the insides of my vertebrae. That's when I realized it was the nitrous that had caused the problem all along - according to almost a hundred years of medical research that I read, the literature unanimously stated that nitrous oxide use depletes Vitamin B12 from the body (and sucks it out of tissues if it isn't available in the bloodstream). Even if the B12 gets replaced within a day or few (as it did in my case), that short-term loss of B12 means that during the period of deficiency, the nerves in my body were not able to repair the myelin sheaths around my spine and all of my neurons.

I stopped doing nitrous all together, and over the next few months I stopped needing to sleep 20+ hours every day, stopped needing a walker to keep from falling, and regained about 90% of the feeling in my hands and about 70% of the feeling in my feet (I have permanent partial 'sock numbness' because of my nitrous use during that time). But there was other damage that could not be repaired. I had had to drop out of school, in an undergrad program at a local university that is highly competitive and impossible to finish unless I somehow both manage to convince them to let me back into the program and take away another candidate's slot, and then I'd have to start over from scratch and take the whole two years over again in order to finish. I have permanent working memory, longterm memory, and cognitive impairments from the damage it did to my brain.

Whoever says that nitrous isn't a 'hard' drug and that it's not addictive, they don't know what they're talking about. It's as addictive as cocaine crack is, at least for me... which is the drug that I ended up getting addicted to next, to replace the spot that nitrous addiction had filled in my life up till the point that I switched addictions. There's several very good reasons that many people call nitrous 'Hippy Crack.'

Exp Year: 2006-2009	ExpID: 104986
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: 33
Published: May 20, 2019	Views: 5,900
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Nitrous Oxide (40) : Retrospective / Summary (11), Addiction & Habituation (10), Post Trip Problems (8), Health Problems (27), Unknown Context (20)