The numbers the Home Office would prefer you to read first: nitrous oxide use among 16 to 24 year-olds was 85 per cent lower in 2024/25 than at its peak in 2019/20. For all adults the drop is 79 per cent. On paper the November 2023 ban, which made nitrous oxide a Class C drug under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 and turned possession into a criminal offence for the first time, looks like exactly what it was sold as: a crackdown that worked.
The paper is wrong, or at least selective. Those headline figures measure the easy part of the problem. The difficult part is what happened to the users who did not stop.
It helps to remember how the ban arrived, because the process tells you what it was for. In 2021 the government asked its own experts, the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, to assess the harms. The ACMD reported in March 2023 and concluded that nitrous oxide’s existing status under the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016 was already appropriate, and advised against making it a Class C drug. Deaths were low, demand for treatment was low, and the Council judged that criminalising possession was not justified by the evidence. The government banned it anyway, as part of its Anti-Social Behaviour Action Plan, and skipped a public consultation on the decision because, in its own words, it was already “minded to introduce the ban.” The House of Lords committee that scrutinises this kind of legislation criticised exactly that. David Nutt, the government’s former chief drugs adviser, called the ban “not based on scientific evidence,” noting that nitrous oxide killed on the order of one person a year against tens of thousands from alcohol, and warned that people denied it might move to something more dangerous. Possession now carries up to two years in prison, supply up to fourteen.
So the policy was never really about the drug’s medical toll, which was small. It was about the sight of it. That is the tell.
Before the ban, nitrous oxide had the social profile of a festival nuisance. Small 8g canisters, a brief euphoria, a pile of silver cartridges at the edge of a park. That picture, annoying as it was, had a moderating feature built in: the vast majority of users were opportunistic. They tried it, they moved on. The criminal-justice approach did not neutralise the drug. It filtered the population using it. Casual users, with nothing at stake, stopped. Dependent users, with something very much at stake, stayed, and escalated.
This is where the ban’s logic collapses. The action plan was designed to clear the streets of visible nuisance, and it did. It cleared them of the people least likely to be harmed. Re-Solv, the solvent and gas misuse charity, reported a 50 to 70 per cent rise in nitrous oxide support requests over the two years to January 2026, with the average age of its service users sitting at 25. Those still using problematically appear to be doing so daily. The number of children in treatment for solvent and inhalant misuse, a category that includes nitrous oxide, nearly tripled from 329 in 2021/22 to 919 in 2024/25. That is not a rounding error. That is a different kind of problem.
The equipment shift makes it worse. Police and Border Force recorded 6,223 seizure incidents in the year to March 2025, a 143 per cent rise on the year before and the highest since records began in 2018, with the quantity seized up 2,185 per cent. Much of that quantity now arrives in canisters of around 600 grams, the size the British Compressed Gases Association flagged in March 2026 as being imported illegitimately and having no legitimate use in the UK. A Home Office official confirmed to TalkingDrugs that there appears to be a trend toward larger canisters, with some forces reporting more of them since the ban. The old whippet regulated the dose by being tiny. A 600g cylinder does not. One waste centre in south-east London logged 2,300 nitrous oxide-related explosions in 2025 alone, from cylinders thrown out with the household rubbish, and the waste industry is now lobbying for a fresh ban aimed specifically at the large canisters the first ban helped create.
The medical consequence of heavier, sustained use is not speculative. Prolonged exposure to nitrous oxide inactivates vitamin B12, which the body needs to make myelin, the protective sheath around nerve fibres. Strip that away and you get myelopathy, peripheral neuropathy, spinal cord damage, and in the worst cases irreversible paralysis. These are not the risks of a balloon at a party. They are the risks of daily use by someone who cannot stop and now has a 600g cylinder instead of an 8g cartridge.
That is the shape of it. The ACMD said the existing law was adequate. The government disagreed, without consulting the public on the decision, because it was already minded to. Drug policy built around what it looks like to be acting is not the same as policy built around what the acting produces. The 85 per cent figure is real. So is the cohort it left behind, and they are using more, in greater quantities, at greater risk, and they are harder to reach now that using is a crime.
