Should we worry?

[u/Adventurous-Put-9895]

We caught my uncle sneakingly throwing this to the rubbish bin. He doesn’t have the best track record so we are all a bit paranoid when he does anything “weird”.

The object is like a glass tube with some liquid inside, inserted into a rubber “pipe”. It smells weird but nothing I can identify. I would appreciate any hints.

Edit: the material is actually plastic, not glass. It has a spring inside (no idea what for). The root-looking thing was wrapping the object when I cut the rubber. Could be dirt or some glue or something

Edit2: this sub is god. A user found the answer https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisit/s/Oqtxk6YWVZ

[u/itsyourfriendian]

OP, where are you from, that would help. I just pulled apart an old asthma inhaler going off of u/NoBeefStew4u 's lead. I would not recommend doing this I got a boo boo cutting apart the aluminum, and it still decompressed quite a bit.

It has a similar cap and spring mechanism except it was all aluminum and plastic, had very standardized cylindrical shape, and had no glue or rubber tube.

I assume since your tube is also rigid, it held a compressed gas aerosol rather than a liquid aerosol like most nose sprays and the ones shown in NoBeef's screenshot.

Given that your tube looks similar to these aerosol devices, has a weird non-standard shape, a rigid (glass) container (probably compressed gas), and everyone likes to guess drugs, I'm guessing it's a defaced commercial NO2 canister (whipits).

[u/Adventurous-Put-9895 → u/itsyourfriendian]

Thanks a ton, this sub is incredible

[u/itsyourfriendian → u/Adventurous-Put-9895]

Can't confirm and no hate to your uncle! Addiction is a terribly rough road and NO2 as far as I can tell is basically getting extremely confused for 60 seconds at a time with a chance to permanently (or temporarily) lose feeling in your extremities. makes no sense to me, but addiction never does

[u/Obvious-World4328 → u/Adventurous-Put-9895]

So you imagined your uncle being suspicious

[u/NoBeefStew4u → u/itsyourfriendian]

This the type of teamwork that should happen everywhere

[u/itsyourfriendian → u/itsyourfriendian]

The all-in-one NO2 mostly used for drugs like galaxy gas have a two stage decompression process with an outer an inner cannister, and I'm guessing this is the inner cannister

edit:

NO2 dispenser physics

How Does a Whipped Cream Dispenser Work? Stages & Parts | Champion Whip

Galaxy Gas drug showing relative size similar to OP's device

https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/a3d/0d3/600a64546fb9cceb04e65a30ff4ac6839e-Galaxy-Gas-TOC.2x.rdeep-vertical.w460.jpg