The federal Food and Drug Administration raided a major seller of poppers last week, and other brands have shut down their websites and social media. Some suspect newly-appointed health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has suggested that poppers cause AIDS, may have spearheaded the move.
Austin-based Double Scorpio, which makes several varieties of poppers, "stopped all operations following a search and seizure at our offices by FDA," the company said in a March 13 statement. "We don't have a lot of information to share but we believe the FDA has performed similar actions towards other companies recently." On Monday, the company launched a new site to sell some of its remaining merchandise but not poppers.
Pac-West Distributing, founded in San Francisco in 1974, makes the popular Rush brand of poppers. The company has replaced its website with just a logo and shut down its phone line.
AFAB Industrial, another Rush producer, has also gone silent, according to Fast Company, which broke the news about the apparent crackdown on March 14. The Bay Area Reporter was unable to reach any of the three companies for comment.
Poppers and AIDS
Poppers, or nitrite inhalants, are vasodilators that expand blood vessels, relax muscles, and can cause euphoria. Many gay and bisexual men use them to make anal sex easier and more pleasurable. Poppers were a common feature of the gay disco and bathhouse scenes of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and they had a resurgence of popularity beyond the LGBTQ community during the rave era.
The FDA has long discouraged the use of poppers. "Make no mistake, ingesting or inhaling poppers seriously jeopardizes your health," Judy McMeekin, PharmD, the FDA's former associate commissioner for regulatory affairs, warned in a 2021 advisory. "Do not ingest or inhale under any circumstances."
Nonetheless, poppers have long existed in a legal gray area. Amyl nitrite is a prescription drug, and butyl nitrite is banned in the United States, but manufacturers have made a multitude of chemically similar products in an effort to stay ahead of the law. Poppers are easily purchased online and at sex shops, smoke shops, and convenience stores, often sold as room deodorizer, leather cleaner, or nail polish remover.
But the recent developments could signal that the FDA, one of several federal health agencies under Kennedy's purview as head of the Department of Health and Human Services, intends to crack down. So far, the agency has offered no details. "As a matter of policy, the FDA does not comment on possible criminal investigations," an agency spokesperson said.
Kennedy has a history of AIDS skepticism, although his current position is hard to fathom because his statements have been contradictory. While he has acknowledged that HIV can cause AIDS, he has suggested that the virus is not the sole factor.
In a June 2023 article in New York magazine, Kennedy told an interviewer, "There are much better candidates than HIV for what causes AIDS." In his 2021 book, "The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health," he favorably cited UC Berkeley molecular biologist Peter Duesberg, Ph.D., who attributes AIDS to environmental and lifestyle factors, including poppers and other recreational drugs.
But the idea that poppers cause AIDS didn't start out as a homophobic conspiracy theory.
Gay activists and clinicians who cared for gay and bi men were among the first to suggest a link in the early 1980s when they noticed that men coming down with unusual pneumonia and cancers frequently used poppers. The first mention of AIDS in the B.A.R. was in a July 2, 1981, Health Shorts column about "gay men's pneumonia," potentially linked to poppers. At the time, the community was grasping for risk factors and looking for anything they could do or avoid to keep themselves safe.
Renowned gay San Francisco advocate Hank Wilson, who helped start several Bay Area AIDS activist and service groups, was particularly vocal about the potential role of poppers. He started the Committee to Monitor Poppers in 1981, opposed their sale and advertising, and co-authored the 1986 book "Death Rush: Poppers and AIDS" with John Lauritsen. Wilson died of lung cancer in 2008.
Some studies have found that inhaled nitrites have a detrimental effect on immune function, and they have been associated with certain cancers in mice and in humans. But in 1983 and 1984, researchers in France and the United States independently identified HIV, or human immunodeficiency virus, as the cause of AIDS. Within a few years, scientists had shown that antiretroviral drugs that disable the virus can halt disease progression and allow the immune system to recover.
The link between poppers and AIDS turned out to be a case of "correlation does not imply causation." Sexually active gay men often use poppers, and this was the main group that succumbed to AIDS in the early years, but that does not mean that poppers themselves cause the disease. A global overview of the epidemic shows that millions of men and women who never used poppers have died of AIDS or are living with HIV.
"Hey, RFK, I never did poppers!" Rebecca Denison, a longtime advocate who was diagnosed with HIV in 1990, declared during her opening talk at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections last week in San Francisco.
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