How one young Australian’s addiction as a teenager is bringing about drug legislation changes

Sam Bramman was fresh out of high school and enjoying his newfound freedom when he was introduced to a silver bulb of pressurised nitrous oxide, also known as a nang.

The then-19-year-old already knew of the drug through popular media and seeing it on shelves at convenience stores and was convinced it was just a “harmless party drug”.

But that first, brief high in 2023 started a six-month-long addiction which ended in a Queensland hospital’s psychiatric ward, hundreds of kilometres away from his home in Sydney, after he fell into a drug-induced psychosis.

Reflecting on his downward spiral, Bramman said he is lucky to be alive.

“I was that addicted to nitrous oxide and that clouded by the addiction that I would do it while I was driving,” he told 7NEWS.com.au.

“That was really, really bad because nangs make you dizzy and pass out.

“So, when I was in my psychosis and on the way to Queensland, I fell asleep at the wheel and woke up on the wrong side of the road on the highway.

“It must have been like, 2am or 3am, so there were no cars luckily.”

He said the addiction led to him losing any sense of “right or wrong” and he “definitely would have died” if his parents hadn’t tracked him down in Tweed Heads to help him.

“I was completely out of my mind. I was walking around the streets all day screaming at cars,” Bramman said.

“I was so different to who I was before I started trying nangs.”

He was placed into an involuntary stay in hospital which began his long road to recovering from the addiction.

Bramman has turned his life around in the several years since he first became addicted.

He began running to help get past a depressive episode and later launched No2Nangs to advocate for legislative changes.

His story and advocacy led to Bramman being invited to stand beside NSW Health Minister Ryan Park to announce new laws which would make it harder for people to purchase nitrous oxide in the state.

The new legislation makes it illegal to sell nitrous oxide to people under the age of 18, offer same-day delivery, sell canisters larger than 10g or sell between the hours of 10pm-5am.

Retailers must also keep stock out of view from customers while suppliers will have to “keep accurate records of nitrous oxide sales for food, beverage or wholesale purposes”.

The ACT announced it would follow NSW’s lead by introducing the same laws later this year.

Bramman said it was surreal to look back at where he came from to make such a change.

“I was once addicted to this drug and I used my past experience with it to not just dwell on it and live my life in regret,” he said.

“I chose to use that experience to build on my future.”

But those efforts are far from done, as Bramman wants laws to change at a federal level to stop other states from lagging behind.

Queensland in particular has become a massive market for the sale of nangs.

Mobile phone apps have been launched dedicated to users getting rapid delivery of canisters as large as 4.6L despite laws prohibiting their sale for recreational use.

Meanwhile, Victoria is described as the “nang capital of Australia”, with a range of canister sizes seen littered across Melbourne’s streets.

Bramman is now looking to expand on his charity work by working joining Track4Change, a 24-hour run with more than a dozen other runners to raise money for a number of causes such as the Cancer Council.