By Ezra Marcus

Photo: Quinn Batley

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In early 2023, Alex took a job at Cloud 9, a strip-mall smoke shop off Atlanta’s I-85. He had recently graduated from college and wanted something laid-back; the shop, with its graffitied ceilings and cheesy blue-light displays, seemed like the ideal register job for a stoner with a music degree.

It didn’t take long for him to realize that many of his customers weren’t there for rolling papers or vapes. They were coming instead for Galaxy Gas, the shop’s toddler-size, candy-flavored, Day-Glo–colored tanks of nitrous oxide. He didn’t know anything about nitrous when he started, but his manager walked him through the basics. “They had to teach me all the legal loopholes you had to jump through, that you had to tell customers that it was for infusing drinks or making whipped creams,” he says.

Soon, he understood exactly what nitrous oxide was. How could he not? His customers were buying hundreds of dollars’ worth of tanks at a time, inhaling as much as they could in the parking lot of the store, then coming back for more, often with strange new limps and tremors. “One guy would come a bunch of times a day,” Alex says (employees’ names have been changed for privacy). “We’d first see him in the morning; he’d just stuff whatever he could fit in his book bag.” Then he’d reappear a few hours later for more, stumbling and slurring his words. But what could Alex do? His card ran. Still, Alex was disturbed. He started telling customers the gas wasn’t in stock even when it was. “The fact that I’ve had to say, ‘Bro, I think you’re good for the day’ is insane,” he says. “I’m not a bartender. This isn’t something where I’m obligated by law to tell you. But just out of my morals, I don’t want to be the person that sells this guy this tank and he goes and hits it in his car, then kills somebody.”

The moral calculations of smoke-shop employees like Alex are the only limit on customers’ ability to purchase as much nitrous oxide as they want. While it’s illegal to sell nitrous oxide explicitly for recreational use, companies can carry it if they say it’s a food-processing propellant for whipped cream and culinary products. Thanks to this loophole, it can be sold legally over the counter (to those 21 and over, depending on the state), online, and in bulk and delivered by head shops like Cloud 9 as well as large chains like Ace Hardware, Walmart, and Amazon.

In the past few years, as nitrous has grown in popularity, distributors have inundated the market with bigger, brighter, and better-tasting tanks. This marketing has been especially effective among teens, who are already accustomed to inhaling flavored substances. But nitrous is a lot more dangerous than the vapes with which it shares shelf space. Heavy users report seizures, mouth lesions, paralysis, brain damage, psychosis, and spinal-cord degeneration. Pedestrians are being killed by drivers huffing in their cars. Those outcomes haven’t slowed the drug’s rise, and for those who got in on the nitrous market early — like Cloud 9 — the trade has been unfathomably lucrative. Alex didn’t know that his employer wasn’t just selling Galaxy Gas — it created the brand. Nor did he know that eventually, according to a Cloud 9 executive, the company’s output would grow to represent nearly 30 percent of all nitrous sold in the country. “They are gray-market specialists,” says another former employee, Chris. “And they’re capitalizing on people’s inability to legislate as fast as they can make new products.”