In recent years, dozens of people have been killed and injured in traffic accidents involving nitrous oxide. This is according to a police inventory. The use of laughing gas was found in 63 fatal accidents and 362 accidents with (serious) injuries.
In the first ten months of this year, the police caught a driver more than 4,000 times using laughing gas behind the wheel, an average of about 400 times a month. This is comparable to the same period last year.
1800 accidents
In total, there were almost 1800 accidents involving nitrous oxide in the past three years. These are accidents with fatalities and injuries, but also collisions with only damage to the body. Last year was a peak year, but this year the number seems to be about as high.
In Amsterdam, Robert Riezebos of the Heart Center of the OLVG and cardiologist and chef de clinique Remko Kuipers raised the alarm about the drug, which many young people still mistakenly regard as relatively innocent.
party drug
“Until last year, as cardiologists, we never saw any problems with the use of laughing gas as a party drug, but in more than a year we had to treat five young patients for serious cardiovascular problems. Young men and women between the ages of 20 and 30,” Riezebos said at the time. “They had used nitrous oxide like others binge. The blood clots caused by excessive use of nitrous oxide can cause a heart attack.”
The total number of traffic incidents involving nitrous oxide use also remains alarmingly high, according to the police. Up to and including October there were 3,518 this year. In the whole of 2019 and 2020, there were 2305 and 4537 traffic incidents respectively.
Joy riding
Other offenses that regularly occur in combination with nitrous oxide use are driving under the influence (1099 incidents), aggressive or unsafe driving (502 incidents) and driving without a valid driver’s license (449 incidents). About twenty incidents involved joyriding, the use of someone else’s car without permission.
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