Nitrous oxide cartridges found in many public places
It’s cheap and easy to buy and its use may be more widespread than thought
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It looks like we have a lot of nitrous oxide aficionados in Toronto, and it’s not limited to a parking lot at Yonge Street and Sheppard Avenue.
My recent column about empty nitrous oxide cartridges at Yonge and Sheppard prompted dozens of emails from readers, saying that people are inhaling it at the parking lot and other public places, too.
Many attributed it to a group of young people who congregate there, some to show off their fast, expensive cars.
I’m not inclined to blame any one group, but the reader consensus is that nitrous oxide cartridges are cheap and easy to buy, and that its use is more widespread than I — and maybe you — had realized.
It’s also known as laughing gas — the stuff used by dentists as a sedative — or “hippy crack,” but it’s no laughing matter.
Excessive use can cause loss of blood pressure, fainting, heart attack and can be fatal in extreme cases.
Vin Val said he’s been working at Yonge and Sheppard “for the past two years and I’ve noticed them there from the start. It’s a 24-hour parking lot with no police or parking enforcement.”
Miranda McCurlie, who lives nearby, said she talked to a parking lot manager last year about the “obnoxious amount of used canisters,” which were cleaned up, but they soon reappeared.
She also talked to police and made the same observation as many others did, about owners of expensive performance cars, adding that she’s seen people tossing empty cartridges out of their cars.
“It’s not just limited to Yonge and Sheppard,” said Lori Johnston, adding, “I have been wondering lately why there were so many at Yonge and Empress Walk,” just up the street.
Vee Ledson said he pulled into a parking lot last summer near the Leslie Street Spit “and discovered about 50 canisters on the ground, including the boxes they had come in. I came to the same conclusion as you, that someone had used them for something other than whipped cream.”
Marnie Wilson-Kent said empty cartridges are also plentiful near Dempsey Park, on Beecroft Road, near Yonge and Sheppard, and that she has also spotted them while walking on other streets in the area.
“You see them doing it openly in a parking lot,” near Finch Avenue East and Sandhurst Circle, said a reader. “Just sitting (in cars) in the parking lot, just throwing away (cartridges) all night long.”
“A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a similar scene, dozens of spent cartridges in an aboveground parking structure at my office at 225 Duncan Mill Rd.,” said Dave Perri.
Clearly, there’s an appetite for nitrous oxide around here. But it’s legal, so what’s to be done about it, if anything? Nothing, except clean up the mess.