Nassau County Bans Nitrous Oxide Sales & Kratom to Protect Youth Health

Nassau County enacts stricter bans on nitrous oxide ('laughing gas') sales, limiting them to licensed food services, and completely bans kratom sales. These measures aim to curb youth abuse of inhalants causing severe health risks, and unregulated supplements with opioid-like effects.

The canisters are frequently marketed to youths under flashy trademark name like Galaxy Gas, sprinkled with intense colors and fruity flavors like tropical strike and strawberry lotion, and has actually caused a TikTok trend of breathing in the harmful gas so rampant that the system outlawed searches for “laughing gas” outright.

The Dangers of Nitrous Oxide Abuse

According to the legislature, the tiny metal cartridges have genuine usages in industrial kitchens as a whipping representative– yet have actually increasingly been misused as a recreational inhalant– a practice that can cause oxygen deprivation, embolism, nerve damages, heart palpitations, loss of awareness, psychosis, tingling, spine and brain damage, paralysis, and even fatality.

“The issue is exactly how simple they’ve become to acquire and abuse. This regulation has to do with placing sensible guardrails in place and protecting our neighborhood, especially our kids, from a severe and growing health danger,” the legislator added.

More than 1,200 Americans died from laughing gas poisoning in between 2010 and 2023, and millions more get high on the gas each year– with customers gravitating toward larger cylinders about 40 times the standard culinary size, according to national data and Nassau Area officials.

Nassau County’s Dual Ban on Inhalants & Kratom

The brand-new regional law goes an action further than the state’s own 2021 restriction on marketing the items to any individual under 21, with Nassau County currently making it an offense for sellers to sell the cylinders anywhere that isn’t an accredited food service.

The restriction comes just one week after Nassau Area likewise all completely disallowed the sale of kratom, an unregulated natural supplement derived from a Southeast Asian plant that health authorities caution can be unsafe and create opioid-like effects in higher doses and has actually never been accepted by the FDA.

That restriction strips the item from store shelves countywide and punishes businesses that continue to sell it with no exceptions, once again going even more than existing state law, which only prohibits sales to those under 21.