Observations placeholder

Laughing gas – nitrous oxide – edited by Michael Shedlin and David Wallechinsky

Scores of notable people have written about their experiences under the influence of nitrous oxide. Coleridge said it provided "more unmingled pleasure than I had ever before experienced." Drieser wrote a one-act play about it; Ginsberg a poem. From Roget to the Grateful Dead, from Samuel Colt to the Jefferson Airplane, from Churchill to Corso, from Robert Southey to Ken Kesey, from 1792 to 1972, truth seekers and free spirits have used nitrous oxide to induce ecstacy and revelation…………..

The East Bay Chemical Philosophy Symposium (EBCPS) is a collective of anarchists who have been studying nitrous oxide since 1968. Our principal research method is the inhalation of large quantities of laughing gas. We have tape recorded countless gas sessions (parties), we have made careful notations of our feelings during the experience, and we have interviewed legions of frequent and occasional users. We have researched the drug in general medical libraries and specialized anaesthesiology libraries all over the country, and we have established an international network of authoritative correspondents and experimenters. We have interviewed the chief anaesthesiologist at major California hospitals, and we have made contact with medical historians and official university drug research advisors who have investigated the use of nitrous oxide.

Bullshit. It's all words. The only way to understand nitrous oxide is to DO IT.

The experience is ineffable, irrational, too strange and marvellous to be comprehended or remembered. However, the immediacy and the transiency of the gas flash do not invalidate it as a real event. It is other worldly; much of the experience remains in a special realm that can only be re-visited through the inhalation of more "air of paradise."