What can a drug say about America? From Big Pharma to the GLP craze to the endless street demand, the implications are manifold. Consider nitrous’ rise, documented everywhere from filings with the Georgia federal courts to the pages of New York Magazine. It’s been hard to ignore. Its fallout is even discussed on the Real News (Azealia Banks’ Instagram story), there via a dispatch about its role in the derangement of one of the 21st century’s most prominent musicians.

Surely, some of this is the product of age-old practices endemic to the companies which sell your run-of-the-mill smoke shop drugs (nicotine products et al.)—youth-focused marketing and a gleeful embrace of legal grey areas to maximize profit.

But why now for nitrous? Why has this particular compound exceeded the street scene outside Phish shows? Have its peddlers—many nowadays offering garishly-clad, enormous tanks of product branded “Galaxy Gas”—just finally cottoned on to the above, same as Juul did long ago? Or does its character suit the national psyche, either in its essential nature or its contemporary moment?

Nitrous oxide was first isolated by the eccentric British polymath Joseph Priestley, a man whose CV as a chemist, political writer, and religious scholar blended the rational and conspiratorial (for every “I invented carbonated water,” there’s a “peddled junk science which rejected the Chemical Revolution”). His fondness for revolution and devotion to Christianity made him a perfect fit for America, to which he fled in 1791 after a rioting mob destroyed his Birmingham home and where he became buds with people like Thomas Jefferson.

There is something of the aura of nitrous’ multivalent discoverer in the substance itself. It is not, like opiates, a sedative or an approach to oblivion through darkness. It is anesthetic, euphoric, and hallucinogenic with an acting mechanism not entirely understood. It is not as physically addictive, but it is easy to access and it can be habit-forming. Both can make the real world dissipate—only one can make AI slop seem profound. It is oblivion through sensorial indulgence. It offers no noble lies about gateways to greater creativity or social disinhibition. It’ll numb you and it’ll thrill you, all at the same time.

In the last few weeks, I have seen people using gas on a public bench and in the passenger seat of a moving car. I have seen a high schooler with the telltale nozzle sticking out from the top of their backpack as they walk down the sidewalk.

If nitrous’ cultural rise is like opiates’ in one way? The smattering of class-actions and magazine pieces means things are far from over—the contagion is only beginning to catch.

 Photographed by Brooke Shanesy