When you walk out the exits of a major concert at Golden Gate Park onto 30th Avenue, usually you hear a chorus of vendors hawking steaming-hot bacon-wrapped hot dogs. But this weekend after the Dead & Company shows, the calls were something entirely different: “ice cold fatties.”
In Grateful Dead parlance, this means oversized balloons full of nitrous oxide, offering concertgoers a quick high — one balloon for $20, two for $30. The deflated colorful balloons could be seen littering the ground surrounding the festival. Dealers were so pervasive that on Saturday night, the San Francisco Police Department spotted a trailer carrying 100 metal tanks, which were presumed to be filled with nitrous oxide, and arrested a Philadelphia man on suspicion of possessing and distributing the drug. Additionally, SFPD told SFGATE it issued three citations and booked one person into San Francisco County Jail.
Nitrous oxide, also known as whippets, cuts off oxygen to the brain, resulting in a euphoric high that lasts a few minutes. It’s primarily used as a sedative by physicians and dentists. Nitrous oxide isn’t illegal to purchase since it does have practical applications, such as adding foamy texture to whipped cream, but distributing it for recreational use is illegal. Around Haight Street, a Reddit user spotted ads offering delivery of 20-pound tanks.
The drug has a long association with the Grateful Dead. An oxygen mask used by band members as a delivery system for the drug was auctioned off on Sotheby’s in 2021. The squeal of a gas can be heard in the experimental song “Barbed Wire Whipping Party,” an outtake from the album “Aoxomoxoa,” and a black-and-white video shows the band sucking on a tank while in the studio. Jerry Garcia himself said the drug was the secret to unlocking one of the more psychedelic tracks on the album, “What’s Become of the Baby.”…