What a gas and "all" legal...nitrous oxide and ether

"A wide variety of reactions would come with the breathing of laughing gas---a suffusion of insight, occasional grandiosity, sometimes belligerence, quasi-mystical experiences...."

Vat19's Accidental Inventions...

In the 1830s, it became increasingly popular for college students to throw parties known as "ether frolics".

Students discovered that when they sniffed the pungent and volatile ether, they would get high. At the same time, nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, was being demonstrated by marketers across the country.

Customers paid 25 cents to watch fellow audience members make fools of themselves while intoxicated by the gas.

Lecture 4: THE DISCOVERY AND INVENTION OF ANESTHESIA (Stories in the History of Medicine) by Adam Blatner, M.D....

There ensued in America and England a bit of a fashion, the idea of enjoying intoxication with nitrous oxide or ether. In the cartoon [above], the caricaturist Gillray shows a demonstration, dated around 1802, featuring probably Davy as an assistant. The cartoonist is stretching the truth to weave in a bit of broad humor: Breathing a gas may make you high, but it won’t make you fart. Still, it was a topic for satire.

Anyway, people enjoyed getting high....

A wide variety of reactions would come with the breathing of laughing gas---a suffusion of insight, occasional grandiosity, sometimes belligerence, quasi-mystical experiences, but the problem is that attempts to write down these experienced insights didn't work: the idea or feeling slips away like a dream

The point to make here is that the two gasses that were to become important anesthetic were first viewed as merely recreational in nature, and in some places made illegal, the way marijuana or MDMA ("Ecstasy") has been more recently treated.