here's a writeup that really stuck with me for the last decade about the surprising level of organized crime in selling nitrous at music festivals:

https://www.villagevoice.com/2010/07/06/inside-the-nitrous-m...

Headshop owners who sell nitrous to obviously addicted people are generally not good citizens. I'd guess they make most of their profit from addicts like me. I only got cut off once after a 2wk/$10k run when I was almost too sick and incoherent to make a purchase. Every other store gladly kept selling to me when I was in that condition.

It’s (comparatively) very cheap in bulk tank form.

But that’s much harder to come by for most people.

The small whippets cartridges... you’re paying for the steel, getting a gas in there and markups. If they filled it with room air, it would cost the same.

I could have looked for tanks to save money, but I surely would have died that way. I could control intake with cartridges because the limiting factor was that you had to keep cracking them. A case of 600 whippets one after another would last about 5 hours, so 2 a minute. I've heard too many stories of people dying with tanks.

Forgive me ... I am completely naive regarding this subject but find these descriptions both fascinating and confusing...

Do I understand: if you're on a whippet bender you have to do a thing every 30 seconds ?

It seems like that would interrupt and greatly diminish whatever pleasurable effects the substance was giving you ... in fact, it sounds somewhat stressful ...

You can put 2-3 into a dispensing canister at a time, but yes, every 60-90 seconds it requires interaction.

This has probably saved a lot of lives, tbh. It's hard to suffocate yourself if doing so requires motor skills.

In Australia, their paramedics have Penthrox tubes that have an anesthetic in them.

The idea is that the patient can self-administer, but if they over do it, they get too messed up to operate the thing until it wears off again.

Cracking whippets is like popping bubble wrap. It's a pleasant repetitive motion that becomes part of automatic muscle memory after a while. It becomes a meditation, like praying the rosary.

Yes, it’s a fleeting rush. I’ve probably done nitrous 5-6 times over a couple of decades but I can see the allure.

Matt Dike famously said the worst thing for an addict is unlimited resources.

Glad you're still with us.

Thanks. I've made a remarkable recovery with a lot of help. I'm sharing this because the subject came up with Tony Hsieh and I know he and I weren't the only ones abusing nitrous. My email is in my profile if anyone out there thinks they have a problem with it and would like to talk about it. I'm raising awareness of the dangers here. It's seductive when you read that philosopher William James had epiphanies with it and want to have them yourself (I'm pretty sure he abused it to.) It took ahold of me pretty quickly. This has been difficult for me today because I'm triggered by thinking about it. I can taste it and feel it. But maybe I warned somebody off from it.

Did you seek professional help on your own, or did someone force you to get help? Sounds like Jewel tried to make Tony get help.

At the point I bottomed out ended up in a homeless shelter. My willful and stubborn way wasn't working, so I made a conscious decision to start doing what people told me to do. I surrendered, if you will. Family and psychology pros got me into a long term treatment program. Fortunately, I had two family members who hadn't given up on me.