Laughing gas ban: a sensible measure or hysterical overreaction?

The possession of nitrous oxide, also known as laughing gas or NOS, is set to become a criminal offence for the first time in the UK, the government has announced.

Announcing the ban as part of a wider crackdown on anti-social behaviour, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak stressed the importance of “strong communities built on values”, said The Independent. He told members of the public in Essex: “We’re going to ban nitrous oxide. And we’re also going to expand the power of the police to do drug testing on arrest for far more crimes and far more drugs and tackle the scourge of drugs.”

Last month, the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs concluded that a ban would be disproportionate to the level of harm associated with nitrous oxide use. The council recommended that further controls should be put in place to prevent misuse of the substance while avoiding imposing “significant burdens” on legitimate uses.

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But the government has ignored that advice, with Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove telling Sky News that discarded laughing gas canisters – known as whippits – are “despoiling public spaces” and that the use of nitrous oxide can have a “psychological and neurological effect and one that contributes to antisocial behaviour overall”.

According to the BBC, the proposed ban is expected to be implemented under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, which regulates drugs based on their perceived harm and potential for misuse.

‘Laughing gas epidemic’

Nitrous oxide is primarily used in medical settings as an anaesthetic or as a food additive, but it is also a popular recreational drug that provides short-lived feelings of euphoria.

An article in the British Medical Journal last year noted the need for increased awareness of the potential dangers of nitrous oxide abuse due to what it called an “epidemic” of use among young people while at festivals, nightclubs and parties.

Doctors raised concerns over the use of the drug after more users began presenting with “neurological complications” after inhaling from large canisters of the gas from containers “80 times the size of whippits”.

“The message is clear: the laughing gas epidemic is no laughing matter at all,” wrote Tom Rawstorne in the Daily Mail. Rawstorne interviewed a receptionist from London who, the paper claimed, is in a wheelchair as a result of spinal damage caused by nitrous oxide. She told him that for “two years my body was breaking down because of all the balloons I did”. She said she no longer rememebered how it felt “not to have pain”, and that the gas was “way more dangerous than people think”.

‘Storm in a teacup’

Experts in drug policy and substance abuse have, however, voiced concerns over the potential criminalisation of nitrous oxide.

Professor David Nutt, director of the neuropsychopharmacology unit at Imperial College London, said that efforts to ban nitrous oxide were “a storm in a teacup” and that the use of the recreational drug is “way less damaging in the long term than alcohol, much less likely to cause aggression, much less impairing of people’s driving performance”.

He told The Guardian: “We don’t ban bungee jumping [although] some people get retinal detachments; we don’t ban people jumping out of airplanes with parachutes, even though they break their backs; we don’t ban things that cause a lot more toxic damage to people’s bodies than nitrous oxide.”

Alex Feis-Bryce, CEO of Transform Drug Policy Foundation, warned that criminalising nitrous oxide would have a “hugely negative long-term impact” on people’s lives and could “disproportionately” affect young black people “who are already over-exposed to policing, surveillance and stop and search”.

Speaking to the i news site, he added that littering is already illegal and it is “unrealistic” to expect overstretched police forces to spend time and resources enforcing the ban.

Christian Calgie, senior political correspondent at the Daily Express, tweeted: “People don’t care about nos, they care about the litter,” adding that people “don’t want new laws, they want the current ones enforced”.