Nitrous oxide, once used in clinical practice, is now a recreational drug of choice for an increasing number of Nigerian youths.
Lagos, Nigeria — One evening in July 2020, Seun [last name withheld], wearing his favourite vintage shirt, a baseball cap and sneakers, boarded a minibus from his home in Mushin to celebrate his 28th birthday with friends at Eleko beach in Lagos.
Midway between the drinks at the party, one friend brought out some balloons from a bag and a blue canister to inflate them. Soon, the entire group was sniffing the balloons.
It was Seun’s first time doing laughing gas, also known as nitrous oxide. He felt unbelievably good and started laughing uncontrollably until the night turned on its head for him at about 10pm.
“I always believed that I could handle any substance so I kept rushing it because it was just air,” Seun, now 31, told Al Jazeera. “It made me smile a lot, then something switched and my head went off. I started running into the water and my friends had to come and carry me. They kept telling me to calm down but I was unable to do that.”
Nitrous oxide, an odourless, colourless gas used by doctors in medical and dental surgery is fast becoming the recreational substance of choice at Lagos nightclubs and parties. In pictures and videos on Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat, users now hold inflated balloons, which to the uninitiated, are just symbols of celebration, not intoxication.
One small business uses catchy hashtags on WhatsApp and Instagram to advertise its reach to parties across eight of Nigeria’s 36 states for deliveries of canisters up to 10kg; another brags about its strawberry and coconut flavours.
The calming effect from the balloons culminates in a euphoric feeling which gives users a fit of the giggles. But its effect is short lived and makes users sniff continuously. And although nitrous oxide seems harmless, experts say it could be consequential, even fatal for people with a history of seizures and respiratory problems.
Drug culture has existed under the radar in Africa’s most populous country for decades. But it has picked up in recent years, experts say. More than a third of youths are now involved in drug abuse, according to Nigeria’s National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA). Yet there are fewer than 250 registered psychiatrists in the country of 220 million people.
Laughing gas abuse is not just a Nigerian problem; usage has been reported in Denmark, the Netherlands and France, just as the United Kingdom has mulled a ban on it. In June, the NDLEA announced a crackdown on marketers and users of laughing gas in the country.
Stella Iwuagwu, executive director of the Centre for the Right to Health, a Lagos-based NGO campaigning against substance abuse in schools, blames the surge partly on a new moral code in which youngsters consider it cool to be filmed or appear in live videos using drugs and other banned substances.
But it is mostly due to frustration with the state of Nigeria, she said. Just three years ago, during Nigeria’s second recession in as many years, the naira exchanged at an average of 380 to $1; today, the naira has fallen to a third of that. Culled from Al Jazeera News
