Make like a butthole and relax. by Vivian McCall
This story originally appeared in our Queer Issue on June 4, 2025.
The best way to get silly or loosen a hole in under 10 seconds is under federal attack.
As heartbroken, perhaps panicky, poppers-users know, the US Food and Drug Administration and their buddies from the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) raided the much-loved Austin-based poppers-maker Double Scorpio in February. Pac-West Distributing, which manufactures Rush (caution-yellow bottle, red lightning bolt, loved by Troye Sivan), wiped its site, leaving only a lonely GIF of its logo. Seller Nitro-Solv completely ceased operations. Asked about possible raids and its position on poppers, the FDA told The Stranger that “as a matter of policy, the FDA does not comment on possible criminal investigations.”
Is this DEFCON 1? In 20 years, will we regale baby gays with stories of Earth-shattering orgasms (and headaches) of a bygone era?
Make like a butthole and relax. This legally gray “high” has been on the government shit list for decades. And while it may seem like President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. instigated this bust on bustin’, that’s not quite right. Nor is this the first time the feds have come for poppers. Whatever the government does, history tells us drug prohibitions don’t work. The phrase, “Be gay, do crime?” It’s actionable.
For the truly lost, poppers are alkyl nitrites in a bottle. Unscrew the cap, raise the bottle to your nostril, and sniff.
You’re up, off, away, and down again before you can count to 10. Assuming you can count. Poppers turn people into (temporarily) horny, gibbering idiots. When you inhale poppers, your blood vessels dilate. There’s a light-headed, woozy rush and a warm trickling all over, like slipping into a bath. Your cheeks glow like coals. Chemical fingers tug the corners of your mouth into an enormous, stupid grin. The world liquefies, and there’s a need to melt into someone, which is easier now that the body’s smooth muscles have gone slack.
It’s a sexy sex drug, great for anal and cramming of all kinds (see “Fill Me Up with Knowledge”). The first real crackdown came in the 1980s, when some, including people in the gay community, believed poppers caused AIDS. This sounds wacky to modern ears. But in the epidemic’s early years, nobody knew why young, seemingly healthy gay and bisexual men were dying sudden, awful deaths. HIV wasn’t discovered until 1983. That the culprit could be a drug popular with these men did not seem ridiculous.
Poppers are not addictive and do not cause AIDS, but can hurt you like most excellent substances. Joshua Lumsden, a PA-C who works at LGBTQ health clinic Capitol Hill Medical and is President of the Washington Academy of Physician Associates, says the risk is generally very, very low. But they’re not risk-free. They can be dangerous when combined with Viagra or Cialis. The oh-so-lovely-smelling drug widens blood vessels, increasing blood flow and dropping blood pressure. Boner pills make boners because they also increase blood flow. Add the two together? People can pass out. Lumsden puts the “fear of God” in his patients about combining the drugs.
But on a scale of coffee to crack cocaine, poppers are way closer to coffee. Still, in 1988, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act outlawed butyl nitrites in the US. The Crime Control Act of 1990 banned isopropyl nitrite and other nitrites (forms of alkyl nitrites used in poppers). Poppers didn’t disappear. Manufacturers escaped their doom through a loophole.
Those who’ve bought poppers are familiar with the song and dance.
You don’t ask your local sex shop for “poppers.” You ask for “head cleaner,” or “leather cleaner,” or “fabric cleaner.” (If you ask for poppers, they may sell you poppers anyway, but blank stares are not uncommon.) It seems stupid (and is), but there’s logic to it. Both the 1988 and 1990 laws allowed nitrites to be sold for non-recreational commercial purposes. Nitrite inhalants? No way, says Uncle Sam. Nitrite for whatever-the-hell, even though its real purpose is obvious? A-okay… sometimes. Maybe?
The federal government would never admit to looking the other way on this—it’s illegal as a drug—but pop into a gas station. See for yourself if it’s a priority. As British writer Adam Zmith wrote in his book Deep Sniff: A History of Poppers and Queer Futures, they “may be the only product that the state allows to be sold on a lie.”
“But what about the raid?” you scream.
“What about my Texas-made, bespoke isobutyl nitrite?” About Double Scorpio, I am sorry, but it’s unlikely Trump or RFK Jr. have launched a tactical strike on bottoms. David Mack, a journalist who has written about poppers for Buzzfeed and Rolling Stone (and is probably more tapped into that closed-off world than any other writer in the US), said these busts come in cycles. RFK Jr. had only been on the job two weeks when the FDA and CPSC cut the tail off Double Scorpion. Mary Toro, the former director of regulatory enforcement at CPSC, told Mack it doesn’t happen that fast.
Everett Farr, whom Mack profiled for Buzzfeed in 2021 and whose Pennsylvania company AFAB Industrial bottles Rush as “nail-polish remover,” confirmed the federal government launched its probe into his business during the Biden administration. Agents visited him a few days before Trump’s inauguration, Farr told Mack for Rolling Stone earlier this year. Biden was also in office when the federal government issued its first real warning about poppers in some time, after people allegedly confused the small bottles for energy shots, drank them, and died.
“History may tell us that in any drug crackdown, the market finds a way,” Mack says. “That there will be new distributors that will pop up. That there will be new manufacturers, new people. Things will get imported from overseas. This is the madness of the entire war on drugs, right?”
Walking into one Seattle-area sex shop, I noticed that the tiny bottles of poppe—I mean, head cleaner—glittered like jewels under a glass countertop. Were they, in a sense, jewels? Soon to be scarce and coveted like Altoid Sours? An employee handed me the business card of the owner, who didn’t get back to me.
Recognizing that more drop-ins would be an exercise in futility, I called eight Seattle-area sex shops instead.
All sold head cleaner.
