| Re: How Narcotic Is Oxygen?
This debate over oxygen narcosis has been going on for longer than I can remember, and it's still not definitively resolved.
The air versus nitrox narcosis is always a hot topic as everyone (by the time they are on these boards) has dived both which yields a lot of anecdotal evidence.
While Randy's experience leaves him feeling the same either way, Dave's experience clearly favored nitrox as less narcotic.
From years of discussions on these tech forums, Dave's is certainly more the norm, and Randy's the exception.
My own experiences where the same dive was done back to back on air/nitrox, (depth of ~100') gave nitrox a noticable advantage. I based my determination of narcosis level by the duration and intensity of my attention span while diving the wreck at 100'.
Since then, I've had several opportunities to watch groups of divers on that wreck, some on air, some on 'trox, (me on 30/30) and I generally observe that the air divers just sort of "zone out" and loose focus within 10 minutes or so, while the trox divers are still more alert to things to see.
Several years back, I recall there being some research findings posted that suggested that O2 was about one fifth to one third as narcotic as nitrogen. That seems to be about what most folks conclude from their experiences.
Can't wait to see some definitive testing results though.
Darlene |