When the sun is out and everything is closed, what is there to do but go to the park? In London, where the restaurants are open but still viewed suspiciously, like pop-up carnival rides, why not take a bottle of wine and some wipes to a patch of grass instead? The people-watching alone is worth it: boxing classes, after-work drinks, first dates, and dinner with the in-laws (at a distance) have all moved outdoors during the pandemic. Recently, in my local park, an entire family started line dancing, a toddler careened down a hill on training wheels, and a man with a macaw did a handstand. On a particularly scenic hill, which overlooks the London Zoo and, in the distance, the empty city center, teen-agers like to smoke and gossip and hug; their relief at seeing one another is palpable. The next day, the debris is everywhere: plastic cups (birthday party), paper confetti (engagement drinks), and countless masks and rubber gloves tangled in the bushes and trees (everything). The parties haven’t stopped—they’ve just moved outside.
Last month, the revelry got so intense that the council of Hackney, a trendy borough of East London, announced a temporary ban on the consumption of alcohol in the area’s popular park, London Fields. “London Fields is not a festival site—it’s a vital green space for everyone,” the Hackney mayor, Philip Glanville, said in a statement brimming with outrage. Some locals were feeling “excluded from the park,” he explained; their lives were “being made a misery because of littering, urinating, defecating and drunken behaviour.” Residents wrote in with their own complaints. “Today I witnessed three individual groups of the public using the estate on Richmond Road as a toilet,” one wrote to the council. “All weekend from early afternoon it’s just people drinking, and urinating, and worse,” another complained, ominously. “We can’t go the morning after as it’s so grim and we can’t let the children run free.”
With everyone lounging (read: drinking) in the not-so-fresh grass, there’s been time to notice the small things, including little silver cannisters of nitrous oxide, also known as laughing gas, left behind after a night out in the park. These containers—thumb-size and shaped like miniature torpedoes—accumulate in areas of frenzied socializing, often discarded alongside a deflated balloon and an empty box of chips. (The balloons dispense the gas. The chips are incidental.) In the U.K., recreational use of laughing gas is common at music festivals and night clubs, and prevalent enough that the Hackney council, in its London Fields injunction, banned it by name, along with alcohol, barbecuing, and playing loud music. A recent Home Office survey of drug use in England and Wales found that nitrous oxide ranked as the third most popular drug across all age groups; among sixteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds, it was the second most popular, after cannabis.
Delight in nitrous oxide is hardly new in the U.K.—the chemist Humphry Davy, who discovered the gas’s consciousness-altering effects, wrote, in 1799, “It made me dance about the laboratory like a madman”—but it still has the power to rankle. On July 21st, Rosie Duffield, the M.P. for Canterbury, raised the issue in Parliament. “We have all seen the telltale bullet-shaped silver canisters and their balloon companions littering our beaches and parks this summer,” she said. “Every single sixth-former and university or college student in Britain will know what those silver canisters are.” She called for tighter restrictions on their sale, noting, “If I bought some canisters for the purpose of indulging in a quick lockdown high, I would not have broken the law.” After Duffield’s speech, the tabloids promptly reported a lockdown-fuelled outbreak of “hippy crack,” as it is sometimes called in the papers. (From the Sun: “No Laughing Matter.”) The Guardian’s Joel Golby added, more wryly, that Duffield’s comments made him “so hungry for a ‘quick lockdown high’ that my whole body could scream for it.”
But is it legal to get high off your face on laughing gas, or not? For a long time, the answer was muddled. In the U.K., it is legal to sell nitrous-oxide cannisters (at the corner store, on the Internet, down the street) for non-recreational use. They are used legally all the time in medicine and catering—to put the whip in whipped cream, for example. In 2016, however, the Psychoactive Substances Act came into effect in the U.K. The act made it illegal to sell or give away for recreational use any substance “capable of producing a psychoactive effect in a person who consumes it.” It was intended to crack down on “spice,” a synthetic cannabis sold on the high street, but it effectively banned many other legal highs as well. The legal status of nitrous oxide now seems a little like a riddle: it is legal to use recreationally, but illegal to sell for recreational purposes. It is legal to sell anywhere, but only to the right customers. On Amazon, where cannisters are often sold with balloons, the reviews are telling. “Makes really good cream for cakes, yes cakes,” one reviewer wrote. “Had a wicked night after eating that cake, yes cake.”
David Nutt, who runs the Neuropsychopharmacology Unit at Imperial College London, finds the whole debate over nitrous oxide a bizarre distraction. “Anyone with an ounce of common sense knows that it’s one of the least harmful drugs,” he told me. Between 2001 and 2016, misuse of the gas caused about two deaths a year in England and Wales, an exceptionally low number for an estimated seven or eight hundred thousand users. Nutt has pointed out that the high lasts less than a minute; it doesn’t cause hangovers or render users unable to drive. Mostly, he told me, the public outcry is about littering. “The main complaint about nitrous oxide is not that people are using it, but the fact that they discard their whippets in car parks or wherever,” he said. “To my mind, that’s like complaining about broken bottles because people drink alcohol.”
Niamh Eastwood, the executive director of the independent drug charity Release, told me that her organization, which has been tracking drug use in the U.K. during lockdown, has found no evidence of a rise in demand for nitrous oxide during the pandemic. The cannisters are just more visible. “We’ve got adults in the park in a way that we’ve never had before,” she told me. “Kids were probably using in the park previously, but adults didn’t notice because they weren’t there.” In addition, “young people have less indoor spaces, or no indoor spaces, to gather, so there’s more use outside.” Stretched councils have also reduced cleaning services in London’s parks. “It’s arguably a littering problem rather than a public-health problem,” Eastwood said.
Whatever the reason—ostentatious littering, the mad desire for a furtive lockdown high—the cannisters are ubiquitous in London this summer. Erika Flowers, an artist who lives in Holloway, in North London, has taken note. She has been collecting the small silver containers since 2017, when they began appearing everywhere. “I was out on the motorbike, and I started seeing them at junctions,” she said. She was often on the road, and she would stop frequently to examine them. “After a while, it started bugging me more and more,” she told me. She and her friend Jack Cheshire, a TV producer and director, began bicycling around the city, scooping up the cannisters. They often returned with several bulging canvas bags full.
Flowers, who is fifty-three, thinks of herself as an eco-conscious fossil collector (“I hate seeing litter”); her parents used to take her to the Jurassic Coast to pick up ammonites and devil’s toenails. She calls the cannisters “nitronites,” and considers them fossils of the human era. “Nitronites are a man-made sub-species of neo-fossil—or ‘Future Fossil’—formed when stainless steel nitrous oxide canisters are [discarded] by recreational users, mainly in urban areas,” her Web site reads. In the past few years, nitronites have found their way into her work. She groups and labels them—“Gigonite,” “Hilarionite,” “Gutteronite”—adds the coördinates where she found them, and fixes them inside glass-covered wooden boxes, like specimens. Sometimes, she adds other found objects: a credit card, a plastic dinosaur. They are funny, and wry, and oddly beautiful.
On a recent Sunday, the morning after an exceptionally warm summer evening, which all of London seemed to spend in the parks, I joined Flowers and Cheshire on a collecting trip. We started at Flowers’s home, a small terraced house cluttered with canvases. Near the back garden, she had stacked dozens of boxes of cannisters, neatly labelled: “Rusty, Squashed”; “Silver, Rolled”; “Silver, Scratched”; “Silver, Squashed & Dappled.” Flowers, who is lean and sprightly, with long blue hair, held up a box labelled “Specials.” “A triangulanite is a special,” she said, noting a cannister that had been smashed into a triangle. She continued, “Bent one’s a special, cracked one’s quite special, and then sometimes I just like the patina.”
On our bikes, we followed Flowers as she wove nimbly through traffic looking for discarded cannisters. From Holloway, we passed through Finsbury Park, where hungover pedestrians were searching out coffee, and then Clissold Park, with no luck. “Parks are really hit and miss,” Flowers told me. The junctions were better, she said: people toss cannisters from their cars after a night out. At the base of a traffic light, Cheshire stopped to pick up a shiny silver one. “Argentonite,” he said, and placed it into a tote hanging from Flowers’s handlebars.
Outside Victoria Park, the cannisters began appearing every few feet, either one by one or in groups. The bag was growing heavy, but Flowers was frowning. “I’m just very disappointed, no bent ones,” she said. In Whitechapel, she abruptly exited the bike path, crossed a number of lanes, and began pacing the edge of a traffic island. She stopped suddenly and pumped her fist in the air, holding up a rusty, bent cannister. “Everything you could want here!” she said.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-uk/the-laughing-gas-wars-of-london
