Well it is basically laughing gas in the extreme. Sort of like when you go to the dentist office and they gas you before minor work.
If you do it proper with a balloon and a cracker, it cuts off a lot of oxygen from your brain and honestly I know it kills way too many brain cells to go back. I found it to be a serious waste of time after a while and it is kind of pricey.
What IS this with the perpetual killing brain cells stuff? Really, everything that makes us feel good is reputedly killing brain cells. Well first, you have plenty and second, the process of brain cells dying does not liberate some unknown chemical that makes you feel good - it doesn't work that way, the chemistry of varying sorts of euphoria rarely has anything to do with death of cells.
If you can hold your breath for a minute and a half then you will never ever have a problem filling your lungs up once with nitrous, no oxygen will be cut off from your brain which has an ample supply for 5 minutes or so (they say three but there are other considerations). So you don't get high from depriving yourself of oxygen, you get drowsy and then dead.
You will not blow up or out your lungs by breathing a small amount from a whipped cream cannister.
The people who have died doing nitrous are ones who set up situations where they were deprived of all oxygen for extended periods, they would have died if they had used ANY innert gas. If you close yourself in a car and open a cannister of helium then you will die because it will either drive all the oxygen out of the car or you will breath what is left, and expell Co2 and eventually, as in all situations of this sort, there won't be anything left to breath.
You can be an idiot and attempt to breath a gas that is escaping from a compressed tank at high speeds and either burst your lungs (highly unlikely because your mouth wuld simply open up under the pressure) or you can freeze your mouth or throat from the venturi effect (I hope that is correct and the spelling is ok - I'm not checking).
there is nothing poisonous or even dangerous about nitrous oxide. If anyone tells you otherwise they are being duped or they are making things up.
Some will tell you that the reason for your high, or confusion surrounding it is because of nitrous's ability to depleate B12 in the body. NO. This is inaccurate, there have been reports that people who use nitrous chronicly get leg cramps and other symptoms of b12 deficiency but we are talking about a whole different thing here.
Studies indicate that nitrous users have higher homocysteine levels than controls but what that actually means is unclear, thses levels seem to have something to do with heart disease or Alzheimer's but there is no evidence of such a thing resulting from nitrous.
Industrial grade nitrous does have contaminants in it, traces of oils, other gases and the like. Breathing vaporised oil isn't very good for you, some gases aren't good for you but breathing from a whipped cream container will not harm you in any way. I will repeat, you and your brain will be fine if you breath from it.
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