VIRUSMYTH HOMEPAGE
THE POPPERS STORY
The Rise and Fall and Rise of 'The Gay Drug'
By Ian Young
Steam Volume 2, Issue 4
"AHAH! HEH HEH HEH HEH! So! You won't take warning, eh? All the worse for you... And now, my beauties - some thing with poison in it I think. With poison in it! But attractive to the eye!"
The Wicked Witch of the West, in The Wizard of Oz
Poppers are back! You may have noticed. After almost dropping from sight
in the mid-to-late AIDies, they've risen to the surface again in the Naughty
Nineties - this time as an illegal, rather than a legal, drug. I live in
Toronto, an a friend who used to work in one of the bathhouses here told
me their basement was filled with crates of the stuff until just a little
while ago. In the dance clubs, vendors wander around selling brown bottles
out of shopping bags, or you can order them from ads in the local gay rag,
imported from Quebec, where they're still legal.
They're not just in the big centers, either. When I visited Saskatoon
a few years ago, everyone on the dance floor of the gay bar seemed to be
snorting them. Of course, in the old days, we could buy them over the counter
at the Yonge Street head shops. Now they're banned - which means the dealers
will come to you.
Of all the drugs, legal and illegal, that have been funnelled into the
gay ghetto over the years, the cheapest and (apart from alcohol and tobacco)
most widely available was poppers. What the scientists call 'nitrite inhalants,'
poppers got their name because when they were first manufactured, they
came in small ampoules that were 'popped' to release fumes. That was when
they were only available on prescription, for the occasional use of certain
heart patients. Once they became a snort 'em-anytime-fun-drug, having to
keep breaking open little ampoules tended to limit one's intake, and since,
as every child of the consumer society knows, more is better, enter the
familiar little brown screw-top bottle.
In the gay ghettos of the Seventies and early Eighties, poppers were
always at the center of the action. On any given night at, say, the Anvil
in Manhattan, a large percentage of the men on the dance floor would have
poppers in hand, and many of the rest would be helping to pass the bottles
around. Some disco clubs would even add to the general euphoria by occasionally
spraying the dance floor with poppers fumes.
Michael Rumaker, in his classic book A day and a Night at the Baths,
describes the tubs as "permeated with that particularly inert, greasy
odor of poppers. Wherever you went, the musky chemical smell of it was
constantly in your nostrils." He found himself heading to the single,
small window, in order to gasp a few breaths of "something other than
the cold, kerosene smell of amyl."
My own most vivid memory of poppers in action goes back to Fire Island,
sometime in the Seventies - that legendary time. Yes, children, I was there,
I remember it. I was vistiting friends in the Pines, and was spending a
couple of hours at the disco one night. Across the room, I noticed an acquaintance
of mine, the writer George Whitmore, dancing up a storm and inhaling liberally
from a poppers bottle which he kept in the pocket of his jeans. Somehow
in the course of the evening, the bottle broke, and the contents spilled
all over George's leg, giving him a terrible and very unsightly burn. It
made me wonder what kind of damage inhaling the stuff must do.
The original, medicinal form of poppers was amyl nitrate, a 'vascular
dilator' used by people with angina. They didn't snort it all night of
course. They just took a whiff of it on odd occasions when the old ticker
felt funny. Still, the product was worth quite a bit to Burroughs Wellcome,
the giant pharmaceutical company that owned the patent and enjoyed a monopoly
on sales.
Then, early in the Sixties, another angina medicine came along, better,
more convenient, and it didn't give you a headache: nitroglycerin tablets.
Suddenly, doctors had something else to prescribe instead of those little
tins of amyl. (In my collection, I have an intriguing artefact from the
Fifties, a little poppers tin marked Burroughs Wellcome - Amyl Nitrate.
It's also marked POISON.) So it seemed amyl would go the way of snuff and
smelling salts, and the sales graph at BW started to head towards the floor.
Whoever thought up the next move was certainly brilliant in their cynical
inventiveness. It occurred to someone that there must surely be other lucrative
markets for amyl nitrate, with its characteristic throbbing 'rush' and
short-lived feeling of euphoria. Somewhere along the line, contacts with
the US military were sounded out, and before long, poppers had found a
new test market in the jungle battlefields of Vietnam.
At the height of the Vietnam War the average GI made his tour of duty
a little more tolerable by getting strung out on a variety of mood-alternating
substances including grass, opium, heroin, and the smorgasbord of amphetamines.
The military in those days had a pretty casual attitude to the drug use
and quite a few backline supply sergeants found they could use their Mob
contacts from civilian life to transport drugs from Southeast Asia to the
US.
From '66 or '67 until the end of the American involvement in the war
in the mid-Seventies, drugs circulated between American cities and the
war zone, and when the war was lost, overseas operations were transferred
to Latin America, with cocaine and crack replacing heroin as the drug of
choice on the street. The CIA had its hand in this, but that's another
story. For the boys in 'Nam, nitrite inhalants were a welcome addition
to the chemical stew. They were legal, they were easy to carry, and they
were being shipped in from the States, literally by the cratefull - touted
as an antidote to gun fumes!
When the surviving GIs returned home, many of them were eager to keep
up their poppers habit, and under heavy pressure from the manufacturers,
the Food and Drug Administration made a ruling sanctioning over-the-counter
sales. Poppers became available without prescription to the American public.
Then about a year later, the first reports of peacetime casualties began
to come in. Terrible skin burns, blackout, breathing difficulties and blood
anomalies caused poppers to be placed under restriction again.
But once you've let the genie out of the bottle, it's pretty difficult
to put him back. The ban on amyl quickly became ineffective when an enterprising
gay medical student in California, Clifford Hassing, altered its atomic
structure just slightly - it isn't hard to do - and applied for a patent
on butyl nitrite. The genie was changing form, as genies will.
Soon, Hassing had been muscled out of his thoughtful little home-lab
operation by larger 'entrepreneurs,' nominally-independent operators controlled
by organized crime syndicates. They made further chemical changes and came
up with butyl and isobutyl nitrite - less pure, more toxic, and even faster-acting
than the original amyl. And with the post-Stonewall rise of the urban,
drug-based 'gay lifestyle,' gays were seen as the ideal market sector for
a new aphrodisiac.
At this point the FDA apparently wanted nothing more than to be done
with the whole business, and a modus vivendi was established. The unwritten
agreement seems to have been: public distribution of poppers would be permitted
- as long as they were labelled 'room odorizer and marketed only to gay
men. With this cynical unwritten agreement, poppers became a multi-million
dollar business for the Mob.
During the Seventies and early Eighties, much of the gay press, including
the most influential glossy publications, came to rely on poppers ads for
a huge chunk of its revenue, and poppers became an accepted part of gay
sex. There was even a comic strip called Poppers, by Jerry Mills. The unwritten
agreement was almost never breached: poppers ads appeared only in gay publications.
The few exceptions were women's magazines with a large gay male readership,
like Playgirl.
Meanwhile, laboratory research on poppers had been quietly proceeding,
and a couple of gay activists had been paying attention. Hank Wilson (on
the West Coast) and John Lauritsen (in the East) formed The Committee to
Monitor Poppers, collecting scientific data on just what poppers were doing.
What they found wasn't good. Apart from causing localized damage to nasal
membranes, poppers have been linked to anemia, strokes, heart, lung, and
brain damage, arterial constriction, cardiovascular collapse, and, most
tellingly, the blood de-oxygenation, thymus atrophy, and chronic depletion
of T-cell ratio's associated with severe immune dysfunction.
Before the first official reports of AIDS in 1981, relatively few voices
had been raised to question what health problems poppers users might be
causing themselves. A few attempts were made to curb sales, but the manufacturers
always got around it by changing either the chemical formula or the product
name. And the gay press, dependent on revenue from ads, did not care to
blow the whistle on its own advertiser. One researcher contacted Robert
McQueen, the Advocate's editor, to warn him that poppers "strongly
suppresses" the immune system and could contribute to KS and Pneumocystis
pneumonia. But McQueen said he wasn't interested. The Advocate ran a series
of ads promoting poppers as a 'Blueprint for Health.'
While researchers and gay advocates warned of danger, the FDA stood
aside; as long as poppers were marketed as room perfume for fags, they
would do nothing. And one popper manufacturer circulated a letter to all
the gay papers, reminding them just who was "the largest advertiser
in the Gay press." They certainly were that, and their ads were obviously
very effective. By 1978, poppers industry profits topped $50 million a
year. So just how were poppers promoted in the gay media? A look through
back issues of gay papers and magazines reveals some interesting features.
An ad for "heavy duty" Bolt, a brand of "liquid incense,"
shows a couple of jock-strapped soldiers, buddies in 'Nam perhaps, sharing
a smoke beside a loaded machine gun. Military nostalgia? Another as shows
a bomb falling on a city, with the caustic caption "It's the Rush
Hour!" There are ads for a brand of poppers known as Crypt Tonight
- a deadly pun linking the crypt and the rock that can kill even Superman.
Another brand was called Satan's Scent, which promised "a devilish
aroma." A brand called Cum showed its bottle as a dripping cock and
balls.
Going over these ads, it's striking how many of them feature bombs,
bullets, weaponry, and other symbols of death and destruction. The most
sinister of all is a full-page colour spread for a brand called Hardware.
It shows an open bottle of the product, surrounded by and seemingly giving
rise to the distinctive, death-seeding mushroom cloud of an atomic (or
hydrogen) bomb. In the head of this reddish-gold phallic cloud are two
human faces, their eyes closed, their noses appearing to melt or dissolve.
Between the faces is another, subliminal image: the head of a snorting
white bull. The text below reads: "Intensely Powerful."
Poppers ads often combined appeals to masculinity and potency with this
sort of overt or covered death imagery. At the same time, the political
right was sending gays messages that they deserved to die, and information
on the deathly effects of poppers was being suppressed. The results for
the gay community were a disaster. A number of studies of the effects of
poppers have strongly suggested a link between poppers use and the appearance
of Kaposi's sarcoma in young gay men.
During the first few years of the AIDS epidemic, poppers came under
suspicion as a possible contributing factor. But after 1984, when the Reagan
administration pronounced a single retrovirus to be the only cause of the
growing list of AIDS illnesses, the health hazards of poppers were dismissed.
All attention and funding was directed to HIV. Eventually, through the
efforts of a few dogged activists and researchers, state legislatures began
to get into the act, and finally, most jurisdiction made poppers illegal
- in spite of a well-financed campaign by a leading manufacturer, W.J.
Freezer, the 'Pope of Poppers.' But even then, information about poppers
was still not made widely available.
Now that the official explanation of AIDS has shown itself to have holes
big enough to drive a truck through, and has produced neither a vaccine
nor a cure, even some in the AIDS establishment are beginning to rethink
their 'HIV Does It All' position, and are taking a new look at a range
of other factors, including the health risks associated with inhaling large
amounts of nitrites.
An article by John Lauritsen in June 13, 1994 issue of the New York
Native, 'The poppers-KS Connection,' summarizes the latest developments.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse is now investigating a possible poppers-KS
link, and even Dr. Robert Gallo, formerly the central pillar of HIV orthodoxy,
is quoted as reassessing the role of poppers in KS: "The nitrites,"
he now says, "could be the primary factor."
A few years ago, I asked an old acquaintance, the Canadian AIDS activist
Michael Lynch, to join with me in asking a popular gay paper to stop advertising
poppers. No, he said, poppers were great, and as a matter of fact he used
them all the time. This in spite of the fact that he was battling serious
lung problems! Well, poppers can be highly addictive. Many gay men who
use them find they're no longer able to enjoy sex without them. Some can't
even jack off without them!
Outlawing liquor during the Prohibition era didn't stop people from
drinking, it only caused a lot of grief and help the Mob get rich. The
recent artificial raising of cigarette prices in Canada was flop, as cigarettes
were smuggled over the border by the truckload. Recent history has shown
that outlawing any given drug causes far more problems than it solves,
and the banning of poppers is unlikely to prove an exception.
The only thing that can make a difference is AEIOU: attitude, education,
information, organization, and understanding. In the meantime, poppers
are back. I have a couple of catalogues here, one from New York City, the
other from the West Coast, offering who knows what ersatz variety of bottled
nitrite inhalants - only they're no longer 'room odorizer' or 'liquid incense'
but 'video head cleaner' and 'polish remover.' "Just like the old
days!" is the slogan. You bet.
George Whitmore, Jerry Mills, Robert McQueen, W.J. Freezer, and Michael
Lynch are no longer with us. They all died of AIDS. Burroughs Wellcome,
of course, the original manufacturers of poppers, went on to fame and fortune
with its monopoly on another fine product, the highly-toxic 'anti-AIDS'
drug AZT. *
Ian is the author of several books of poetry, and editor
of The Male Muse and Son of the Male Muse, among others. The above article
is adapted from 'The Stonewall Experiment: A Gay Psychohistory', published by Cassell.
VIRUSMYTH HOMEPAGE