It's comparatively safe. See e.g. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20503245221127301. Cocaine is a very dangerous drug both because of its physical effects - cardiac issues, stroke, seizure - as well as its effect on risktaking. In order to "destroy your brain" using nitrous you need to take heroic quantities of it and get hypoxia: from memory somewhere near a hundred times the typical dose is required, and it must be maintained over a long period of redosing. For more dangerous drugs, that multiple is lower: heroin can be lethal at 1.4x the typical dose.
It is wrong to claim it's an especially dangerous drug, particularly if your evidence is an anecdote about "many people who have destroyed their brains" in a nameless country based on no quantitative evidence and citing no personal experience.
You don't seem to know the most basic reason why it is so dangerous, it's not hypoxia. The problem is that it oxidizes vitamin B12 which leads to demyelination and is neurotoxic even in a single dose(Although the harm seems to be reversible in that case). This is what causes the neurological symptoms. Personally I would much rather die from a heartattack or a stroke then never walk again.
Give me a source for B12 deficiency being serious enough that it's comparable to the health risks associated with cocaine, of all drugs. All the reports I'm aware of involve extreme levels of daily use, e.g. https://journals.lww.com/jfmpc/fulltext/2020/09110/recreatio... ("75-100 canisters daily"). The idea that a single dose will oxidise enough B12 to be clinically significant is not supported by evidence, it's something you've made up, unless you're claiming a dose is made up of 75-100 canisters.
Personally I would rather compare the actual incident rates of side effects from drugs than make a false choice between the most extreme symptoms, particularly when one of them is a common and relatively safe form of anesthesia.
First off. It's really not nice throwing out terms like "it's something you've made up". But anyway here are some pointers why I think that Nitrous oxide is worse then cocaine, these are stats from the Netherlands because that's where I did the research:
A single dose shows traceable, but reverseable, neurotoxic effects in rats:
> Our findings demonstrate that short-term exposure of adult rats to N2O causes injury to PC/RSC neurons that is rapidly reversible, and prolonged N2O exposure causes neuronal cell death.
In the Netherlands the lower bound of people with paralysis, such as beeing unable to walk due to the effects of using Nitrous oxide is 64 in 2020. And that is by querying a subset of hospitals. These are indeed extreme usage cases. You also don't get a heart attack from snorting a few lines of coke.
That's worse than I was aware of. Thanks for putting some rough stats on the size of the problem.
At the same time, in the US in 2021 there were 7.1 cocaine-related deaths per 100k[0], and 1.7% of the population had used cocaine in the past year[1], so their mortality rate is more like 417 deaths per 100k. That's hugely higher than the rate in the Netherlands and I wonder why there's such a difference.
>That's hugely higher than the rate in the Netherlands and I wonder why there's such a difference.
Interesting. I wonder if average drug purity and common adulterants make up for this difference? What is the average "street" cocaine purity in the US vs the Netherlands? What do they cut it with? Inert substances? Amphetamines? Meth? Mephedrone? Who knows.
Also, what about the mode of taking it. Is there huge variability in how the users take it between the two countries due to different culture? (snorting vs smoking vs injecting, also multi-drug use). Finally, what if in one country this particular drug is more popular with the older population while in the other it's "all the rage" with the younger people? Death statistics will be different too.
