I will note that there’s currently a fad for cocktails served with some dry ice added. They smoke and bubble very prettily. Plenty of people drink them while that’s still going on with no ill effect.
There’s certainly a dose dependency there and they may not be inhaling enough CO2, or enough cold, to matter. For sure if any of those drinkers ended up with a sugar cube-sized hunk of dry ice in their mouth they’d be injured by the cold although probably not seriously.
I sniffed a little pure CO2 in high school chemistry class. It burned as if I’d inhaled wasabi. Do not recommend.
Is this what they mean by “this is your brain on drugs”?
Just when thought I read the worst idea of the week
it gets topped.
Seriously: do not try that. Neither the one, nor the other.
But if you decide otherwise make it on a life death feed in social media. You will get postHomie-ously famous (what a terrible pun! But not bad compared with your idea) and might get a Darwin Award.
If you don’t already have one, buy a freezer with at least 8 cubic feet of capacity. Next Winter fill it with containers (trash bags will do) of snow that has not been packed down and will allow air to pass thru. Use snow packed into your bong to cool your smoke. Bongs with ice catchers don’t work so well for this method. Keep your bong in the freezer so a load of snow will last a few days.
My old high school buddy studied Chemistry at Purdue University.
His sage advice: crushed ice and lemon juice.
Hey, engineers gonna engineer. It’s just what they do.
I tried to make some druggy pun riffing off “That’s just how they roll” instead, but I don’t know enough druggy terminology to make it work. Anyone else care to try?
Your brain is quite sensitive to even small amounts of CO2 and even at 1000 ppm you will start to observe obvious effects (drowsiness, headaches, difficulty with focus). At a 5% mixture in air you will immediately experience involuntary reactions and will rapidly (within a minute or to) become unconscious. As I noted above, unlike water ice to water vapor (which is not chemically harmful), dry ice will directly sublimate into gaseous CO2 at temperatures above −109.2 °F (−78.5 °C) and expanding as it does so, so if running hot gas products over it you can expect to produce a significant volume of gas, almost certainly enough to have a respiratory impact if not at toxic levels.
The nitrogen is physiologically inert and won’t chemically hurt the user (dry air is 78% nitrogen after all) unless it displaces enough oxygen to result in asphyxia but unlike carbon dioxide you win’t be able to tell. In industrial settings pure nitrogen gas is quite dangerous because diatomic nitrogen is slightly heavier than air and will accumulate in contained volumes which will cause unaware workers to pass out, and would-be rescuers, not perceiving the harm, may run in to experience the same fate. (This is why it is crucially important if you find someone passed out for no apparent reason to assess the situation before approaching and have someone remain outside to call for help.) The boiling point of LN2 at STP is −196 °C (−321 °F; 77 K) so the emissions are quite cold enough to cause frostbite and cold damage to tissues but a gas at such temperatures will also act as a vasoconstrictor, presumably retarding uptake of the psychoactive compounds, thus negating the benefit of cooling the bong gases.
I’m not a user of marijuana or any other intoxicant aside from alcohol but I figure that of you’re going to give someone guidance it should come from your own experience, and I know with regard to this setup are thermochemistry and process control. In reality this is probably not an improvement over ‘vaping’ the extracted THC but overcomplicating things and then hyping them as the new hotness is the fundamental principle that the post-industrial pseudowealth of Silicon Valley os based upon. That, and arguing over ‘tabs versus spaces’.
Stranger
Nah, I like it.
We sell dry ice where I work. Every so often kids open the lid of the cooler it is kept in and stick their heads in. So far no one has passed out. We’ve also had people get cold injuries from handling it with their bare hands.
People are often ignorant of the differences between dry and water ice. They are often too casual with it. It’s not a toy, that’s why you have to be over 18 to buy it in my state (which age restriction has occasionally outraged people).
Would a tiny bit of dry ice destroy your bong/lungs/whatever? Probably not. I’m no expert and you shouldn’t take advice from me on this subject. But maybe I’m wrong. Even if I’m not - how much is too much? Is this really the sort of experiment you want to run on yourself? Especially while under the influence of a drug?
That is because the cooler is insulated and the surrounding air is close to the sublimation temperature so the rate of gaseous CO2 production is low. If you run heated gas over the ice or put it into contact with a room temperature container it will start sublimating rapidly, and if you are intentionally inhaling from this mixture of marijuana smoke and the suddenly expanded CO2 the latter will likely be in concentrations that will induce adverse physiological responses.
Stranger
The production rate is low but it is, presumably constant (because the blocks inside gradually shrink over time). If the cooler is being opened frequently then the resulting CO2 gets diluted, but if it hasn’t been opened for awhile then it certainly can build up inside.
Can it build up enough to cause problems? I’d rather not find out.
Unquestionably heat will increase the sublimation rate, which could cause problems in a confined space.
This can be very dangerous :-
Cheap ones are. Good ones are made with borosilicate glass.
Exactly. And the first impact is the sense of “air hunger”. Harder to hold a hit any length of time.
I haven’t used a bong in maybe 45 years but my understanding is that the ice catcher is in the tube after the smoke is already passed through the water. Smoke inhaled directly through a regular pipe is mixed with enough air to be inhaled comfortably. What is the temperature of smoke after percolating through the water of a bong? I dunno but clearly not a “hot gas” level. Warm maybe. And the chunk of dry ice doesn’t have tons of surface area.
It would create a nice pretty cloud of water vapor as it passes. The chunk would be jiggling in the ice catcher lots.
I don’t have the math chops but I suspect you do. Assume a one inch cube of dry ice and a deep inspiration of 3 liters being pulled across the cube. Slightly warmer than room temperature maybe by the time the diluted smoke air mixture is pulled through the water and mixed with water vapor.
How much CO2 is likely to sublimate? The whole cube in one hit or several hits? What would be the CO2 concentration of the mixture?
The one catch I can think of. As it sits there between hits the CO2 would fill the volume of space above the water level to the mouthpiece. So the initial portion of the hit would be whatever that volume was of mostly CO2.
See the article I linked to. That was pretty much the circumstance. Yes the bottom of the cooler is pooled sublimated CO2. They aren’t getting so deep in. They are getting to where the room air hits the cold air and forms visible vapor as it mixes and cools rapidly. Reach in deeply multiple times and you are that grad student who passed out. Fortunately not into the case.
If you fill the bong with liquid oxygen, you would not have to fret about inhaling dangerous gasses, but I imagine the bong would explode when you sink the hit.
Hot. Not as hot as it would be if you inhaed directly, but still fucking hot. Which is why some stoners, myself included, prefer bongs with ice in the neck, so that the water-cooled smoke is cooled once again as it passes over your (water) ice. I want to put dry ice in the neck, not in the water itself. All putting it in the water will do is create an eerie smoke effect that I neither want nor need.
Couldn’t you ‘immerse’ the bong in dry ice in some sort of a sturdy plastic bag that you could secure tightly around the body of the bong?
This way, you’d get the cooling from the outside without any inhalation risks.
Think about how a champagne bucket works: filled with ice, it cools the champagne without the ice/water entering the bottle.
Great thinking there @DavidNRockies. But I’d approach the same concept differently …
Plain old water ice (or ice water) is plenty cold enough to cool bong smoke. All you need is more time of exposure of the smoke to the water ice. Can you arrange something more like a condensing coil immersed in water to give the smoke a longer dwell time and path length on its way from the fire to your face?
Dry ice is simultaneously too cold, and too quick to sublimate, and dangerous to boot. It’s a terrible material for this purpose; its only virtue is it’s easy to buy and it has some superficial attraction as “supercold!”.
Overall I’m thinking that the mistake here is trying to convert a typical bong to this purpose with minimal modifications versus designing a pot burning smoke cooling device from scratch. It’ll have many of the same concepts as a bong but be physically quite different.