Glastonbury 2015: Has the hippie crack balloon burst? What is nitrous oxide anyway?

Silver canisters have been strewn all over Worthy Farm as revellers enjoy the legal high

Festival-goers partaking of nitrous oxide at Glastonbury 2014 (Getty Image)

Last year more than two tonnes of used nitrous oxide containers were picked up from the fields of Glastonbury. The silver, bullet-shaped canisters contain a mild anaesthetic normally administered to dental patients or to women in labour.

But the legal high, colloquially known as both laughing gas and hippie crack, has become the second-most used recreational drug in Britain, taken by a reported 400,000 16 to 24-year-olds last year.

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Walk around Glastonbury today and you may come across people inhaling colourful balloons full of the stuff. Users claim to experience feelings of euphoria and it is becoming increasingly popular at music festivals despite many having a policy of “no legal highs”.

A second reading of a bill earlier this month will make it illegal to sell, produce or distribute “new psychoactive substances” in this country, but possession of legal highs for consumption is not a criminal offence.

Deaths linked to nitrous oxide are thankfully rare but an exploding canister is believed to have been the cause of a “major injury” at Glastonbury last year. Yesterday a coroner blamed the drug for a 22-year-old Brighton man’s death after 200 used canisters were found in his room.

In April the co-ordinator of Glastonbury’s Green Fields, Liz Eliot, wrote a blog imploring festival-goers to leave nitrous oxide at home this year.

Glastonbury festival-goers inhale nitrous oxide out of balloons (Matt Cardy /Getty)

She cited the environmental impact (it is nearly 300 times more damaging to the atmosphere than carbon dioxide) as well as other dangers associated with the drugs and requested that revellers keep it out of the King’s Meadow – the area of the site containing the Stone Circle.

“Sadly the King’s Meadow has lost its way,” she wrote. “It’s become known as a place where people take nitrous oxide, a damaging drug which pollutes our beautiful field with noise, litter and N20 gas…Nitrous oxide is also dangerous: an exploding canister was the source of a major injury at last year’s Glastonbury.”

Somerset and Avon constabulary say they are working with Glastonbury to implement "a policy” on legal highs designed by festival organisers. But so far nobody from Glastonbury has returned my request for comment about whether or not this is working.

Pictures from day one of the festival show some discarded canisters but according to The Independent’s spies on the ground so far only a few people are blatantly inhaling the drug and it seems to be the activity of a few rather than a lot. But that hasn't stopped the tabloids from splashing pictures of youngsters breathing in balloons for breakfast all over front pages.

Let’s hope those partaking are at least avoiding the King’s Meadow and the wrath of anyone found to defile the sacred space.