Teenagers in Hong Kong have found a new way to escape the gravity of their everyday lives. Their drug of choice? A synthetic narcotic they’ve nicknamed “space oil”.
With slow, deliberate breaths from their vapes, they chase a fleeting high: a peculiar blend of exhilaration and suffocation, like binge-drinking in a room with no air. For a brief moment, they feel weightless, untethered, like astronauts adrift.
“Space oil” is cooked up using etomidate, a medical anaesthetic that was previously classified as a “poison”. On February 14 this year, the Hong Kong government reclassified etomidate as a “dangerous drug”, banning its use. By then, however, the damage was done. Etomidate first started gaining traction in 2023 and by the time it was reclassified, variants of the narcotic had already proliferated.
It’s commendable that authorities are quickly banning new variants, but playing regulatory whack-a-mole without understanding the root causes of the problem is putting the cart before the horse.
So what is driving the city’s youth to inhale this noxious concoction? And more importantly, how can we stop it? To tackle the problem, we first need to understand the psychology behind its appeal.
The familiarity effect
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