Thursday 9 July 2009

Didn't inhale.



Another root through the bins on the festival site - there's an image for you - revealed these.

During my travels during Glastonbury Festival, I wandered up to the Stone Circle on a few occasions, and admittedly, thought it was a bit odd that everyone up there was playing with balloons.
Still, having failed my degree in Drugs and getting high, I just thought that everyone was playing with balloons and having a wonderful fun time - yes, I know /now/ that what they were actually doing was getting off their faces on nitrous oxide.



A lungful of nitrous oxide - or laughing gas, or according to The Telegraph "hippie crack" - offers the user a temporary, dizzying rush, but apparently comes along with side effects including bone-marrow suppression, blood-cell problems, poisoning of the central nervous system and the risk of fatal asphyxiation.
It's generally inhaled from a balloon filled from one of these little canisters, which are.. I dunno, three centimetres long, by a centimetre wide, maybe? Not very big at all.

So, aside from the fact that I'm not as down with the kids as I thought I was (i.e. not at all), I was mildly disturbed to be told that clean-up staff had eight wheelie bins full of these discarded canisters.

That's probably more nitrous oxide than was used in making the film series The Fast and The Furious, including that one about motorbikes that no-one saw. Or inflate forty elephants or some other equally astounding image that's supposed to illustrate the sheer volume of something, but I'm too busy to research.
It just seems a bit..tacky. It's hardly sticking it to the man.

"Take that society! I'm doing a legal high at a stone circle at a hippy festival. Raar!"

And no, I'm not advocating doing illegal highs instead. I appreciate that people have been trying to blow their minds for a gazillion years with a number of substances, and that's their call. But it's illegal and sooner or later they generally end up on a news page filling a bit of space, which is quite nice for me, but not so much for them.

Anyway, I digress.

All those little canisters are off to scrap metal merchants, so that's something, I suppose.

But eight wheelie bins? Yeesh.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's against the prescriptive medicines act to sell nitrous for inhalation.
Some people were arrested in the stone circle for doing this.

Sky said...

Yup. As far as I can tell it's illegal to sell, but legal to use? Go figure.