My nitrous use and the Fink Effect

[Hilopsilo]

I've done a good bit of research and have a good understanding what the risks of nitrous are, but not so much what level/fashion of usage will (likely) cause such things. To my understanding, B12 depletion and diffusion hypoxia/the Fink effect are the main concerns. The latter, I have less of an understanding of and is my main concern. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fink_effect )

I'll binge nitrous probably ~3 occasions per year, evenly spaced but maybe clustered in the summer months. On these occasions I'll consume up 100-150 chargers over the course of 2-3 days, then I won't inhale it again until another one of those occasions.

My technique for inhaling nitrous is to release 2-4 into a dispenser, fill a large balloon, and inhale lungfuls. I never breath back into the balloon, or breath continuously on the balloon of nitrous. I inhale it sort of like how I smoke weed but holding a bit longer; deep inhalation, hold for 5-20 seconds, exhale and back to breathing oxygen deeply.

I do however often do lungfuls in quick succession/chains; inhale lungful, hold for 5-20 seconds, exhale, take 3 deep (but hasty) breaths of oxygen, then inhale another lungful of nitrous. At most I've done this 4 times in a row before taking a couple minute break at the very least and having another go. Often when I do repeated hits like this, I'll only be taking small inhalations of nitrous that fill my lungs maybe only 60% and then adding some air, sort of like smoking a cigarette; just small inhalations spaces out between breaths of air.

I was sort of under the impression that so long as I take long breaks between these binges, take bioavailable B12 regularly, be aware of B12 deficiency symptoms, and never repeatedly breath in and out of the balloon, I'd likely be 100% fine. But reading about the Fink Effect, it seems that with extended use of nitrous, like in a binge, you can sort of enter into lowered average levels of oxygen in the blood even if you're getting minutes of breaths of oxygen between breathing nitrous hits. But its hard for me to gauge whether my level of use would actually induce the fink effect in any problematic way.

 

[Phobos]

May I ask why you chose to spend 3 nights per year to breathe nitrous?
Is it for the dissociative effect?

 

[Chris Timothy]

Keep in mind that you wouldn't even notice if the amount of oxygen in your environment were to be cut in half, like sometimes happened in bunkers during war. People were standing around just fine, apart from not being able to light any of their cigarettes. There's quite some margin there for oxidation homeostasis. And even if you drop below what you need for consciousness, blacking out for a couple of minutes seems to be the worst that can happen.

 

[Hilopsilo]

May I ask why you chose to spend 3 nights per year to breathe nitrous?
Is it for the dissociative effect?

In combination with MDMA and a psychedelic, it gives me these really short DMT-like experiences, blasts you off completely, most profound thing i've ever experienced. It sometimes doesn't even take that much nitrous, but I've found you can go deeper and deeper into this trip if you can learn to keep hitting the nitrous while you're in the blast-off. I've found life's greatest pleasure is going to a festival and dancing the night away on MDMA+LSD+nitrous

Keep in mind that you wouldn't even notice if the amount of oxygen in your environment were to be cut in half, like sometimes happened in bunkers during war. People were standing around just fine, apart from not being able to light any of their cigarettes. There's quite some margin there for oxidation homeostasis. And even if you drop below what you need for consciousness, blacking out for a couple of minutes seems to be the worst that can happen.

"As stated previously, nitrous oxide inhalation can block the normal flow of oxygen to the brain. This occurs when the gas builds up in the body more rapidly than it can be removed through natural elimination. The technical term for nitrous oxide’s effects on oxygen levels is diffusion hypoxia. As we’ve already noted, doctors and dentists work to avoid diffusion hypoxia by supplying their patients with enough oxygen to offset a nitrous oxide buildup.

However, abusers of the gas almost universally inhale it without supplemental oxygen. This means that each nitrous oxide inhalation can trigger the onset of hypoxia. While this effect, like the gas itself, only lasts for a short amount of time, it also produces cumulative results. This means that people who use the gas repeatedly or for extended periods of time during a single session can develop increasing levels of oxygen deprivation. In some cases, this deprivation can result in death. In addition, hypoxia can lead directly to brain damage by starving individual brain cells of their oxygen supply and killing them." https://www.drugaddictiontreatment....-drugs/health-effects-of-nitrous-oxide-abuse/

this is what I'm concerned about

 

[Chris Timothy]

Of course it's cumulative, respiration isn't binary.

It still only takes a couple of minutes to revert to your previous degree of suffocation, should you exceed a line. I don't see how you can kill yourself, without gas mask or the like.

 

[Phobos]

In combination with MDMA and a psychedelic, it gives me these really short DMT-like experiences, blasts you off completely, most profound thing i've ever experienced. It sometimes doesn't even take that much nitrous, but I've found you can go deeper and deeper into this trip if you can learn to keep hitting the nitrous while you're in the blast-off. I've found life's greatest pleasure is going to a festival and dancing the night away on MDMA+LSD+nitrous

Why not Ketamine then? Would surely have the advantage of letting you breathe and your hands would be free.
Ofcourse being careful about dosage as the MDMA+Ketamine combo can lead to overheating.

 

[Bitchniggaz]

I know many gas heads who do 10liter tanks by themself in a night (including myself hehe)

In all the years i only know one person who got severe side effects from it.
But all of us eat alot meat and shell fish to get a ton of b12 etc.

However ymmw and bad luck can def be a factor.

 

[Hilopsilo]

Of course it's cumulative, respiration isn't binary.

It still only takes a couple of minutes to revert to your previous degree of suffocation, should you exceed a line. I don't see how you can kill yourself, without gas mask or the like.

Not so much worried about suffocation and dying as I am about retaining low level cumulative brain damage from low level cumulative hypoxia over the course of a couple days and sessions. Like "ambient" brain damage that'll build up over time,

Why not Ketamine then? Would surely have the advantage of letting you breathe and your hands would be free.
Ofcourse being careful about dosage as the MDMA+Ketamine combo can lead to overheating.

Personally, I can't stand ketamine and can't tell much of any similarity between ketamine and nitrous other than their very literal disociative properties; they make you feel a bit out-of-body. I've tried it plenty of times over the years but its just not for me, I'll save you my ketamine-hater rant lol. I wish there was a good alternative, nitrous is extremely inconvenient, short lived and creates a shit ton of garbage.

I know many gas heads who do 10liter tanks by themself in a night (including myself hehe)

In all the years i only know one person who got severe side effects from it.
But all of us eat alot meat and shell fish to get a ton of b12 etc.

However ymmw and bad luck can def be a factor.

Yeah this has been my problem when trying to research this, most research is on clinical use where people are breathing ratios of nitrous to oxygen over long periods of time, or case studies of usage way above mine (like every day for months on end, sometimes 1000x my usage).

I probably shouldn't worry about it, just hadn't heard of this diffusion hypoxia thing and it seemed like a greater risks it could go easily unnoticed whereas you can monitor B12 levels and compensate for that pretty easily.

 

[Xorkoth]

Why not Ketamine then? Would surely have the advantage of letting you breathe and your hands would be free.
Ofcourse being careful about dosage as the MDMA+Ketamine combo can lead to overheating.

Ketamine and nitrous are totally different beasts. Nitrous is literally the most profound (but intensely brief and hard to remember) state I've ever been to, when combined with psychedelics. Utterly different from ketamine. Nitrous is quite unique. It's also quite safe and relatively harmless, if you don't do it often. It's not like other inhalants that cause brain damage. That's why it's still used to this day in dentistry.

To the OP: I don't think you need to worry about B12 deprivation using it 3 times a year. That worry comes in when chronically abusing it, and then it is a very real concern.

 

[Chris Timothy]

I stopped doing whippets when I learned there's some goop in every ampule you crack. It's not as pure as the balloons at festivals from the big tanks. That's something I'd be concerned about before worrying about non-lethal damage of hypoxia, personally.

 

[Hilopsilo]

Ketamine and nitrous are totally different beasts. Nitrous is literally the most profound (but intensely brief and hard to remember) state I've ever been to, when combined with psychedelics. Utterly different from ketamine. Nitrous is quite unique. It's also quite safe and relatively harmless, if you don't do it often. It's not like other inhalants that cause brain damage. That's why it's still used to this day in dentistry.

To the OP: I don't think you need to worry about B12 deprivation using it 3 times a year. That worry comes in when chronically abusing it, and then it is a very real concern.

The bolded text right there, I 100% agree. I don't have extremely extensive experience with DMT, but nitrous combined with LSD is what I feel allows you to achieve a very short lived "LSD-version of DMT" (or, better yet, the "DMT-version of a candy-flip").

Thank you, thats reassuring, definitely feels better to indulge in something like nitrous when you know its safe lol, the moreish nature of it can be concerning. I'm always wondering what really constitutes "chronically abusing it"; I have a general idea of how often is healthy to trip or take MDMA, but whippits its hard to get an idea because you could do 1 every day for 365 days a year and the health effects might be completely different than 365 whippits in a single day. I only hear reports of extreme use and extreme symptons, nothing in between that and abstaining completely.

I stopped doing whippets when I learned there's some goop in every ampule you crack. It's not as pure as the balloons at festivals from the big tanks. That's something I'd be concerned about before worrying about non-lethal damage of hypoxia, personally.

I was reading on erowid so long as you inhale it through something cloth like a shirt sleeve or bandana gets the vast majority of that crap out. And even so, think of all the people who live in cities and are breathing pollution crap all day every day, and its only at that point does anything bad really happen health-wise. And if I'm doing even 150 lungs of nitrous over a couple days, cigarettes are full of all sorts of stuff and 150 drags of a cigarette isn't much (not that its good for you, but still). But still, to be safe I always inhale it through my sleeve/shirt.

I think I got through as much literature as exists on the topic of nasty shit flying out of whippits, and it didn't sound like a major concern. interested in any more info on that though