Poppers, a party substance long popular with gay men, were thrust into the national spotlight last week when one producer, Double Scorpio, claimed that they halted operations due to a search and seizure by the FDA. There's been no official statement from the FDA saying this raid took place, but the suggestion of a raid — against producers of a substance disproportionately popular with the queer community — certainly raised some eyebrows. Brittany is joined by Selena Simmons-Duffin, NPR's health policy correspondent, and Alex Abad-Santos, Senior Correspondent at Vox. Together they talk about the FDA's concerns about poppers — even before our current administration — and the conspiracy theory that's giving some gay men flashbacks to the 1980s.Support public media. Join NPR Plus today.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What are poppers and why are they controversial?
I didn't wear business casual to the club. The sheer, the spandex, the thigh-high boots. Wow. I was Miss in the streets for real.
So I'm retired now. That's amazing.
But I really was a 365 party girl. Wow. Well, 365 party girl is, of course, a reference to my favorite brat, Charlie XCX. We'll come back to her later. But first, let me set the scene for this conversation. Last week, the FDA allegedly raided businesses who produce amyl nitrite, aka poppers.
Poppers are a liquid chemical compound typically found in tiny bottles, and the chemical is sometimes used by doctors to treat heart conditions. But when huffed as an inhalant, it gives people a euphoric high that lasts for a few minutes. Now, poppers have been around for over half a century and have existed in a legal gray zone for decades.
But over the past decade, they've gotten more and more popular. So popular that you can find them at a bodega or a gas station. So why is the FDA apparently so interested in stopping their production? And does that have to do with who uses poppers the most? So question, Alex, who uses poppers and how prevalent is their use?
As a gay man of a certain age, I can confidently say that gay guys love poppers or have loved poppers. But I would say that it's mostly like a queer party drug now. Like the aforementioned Charli XCX, she famously had some meet and greets. She signed some poppers and they become kind of like this pop culture meme.
Yes, yes. I mean, you can still see that image surfacing on social media today. And then there is Charlie's touring mate, the gay Australian pop star, Troye Sivan, love his music, whose global hit from 2023, Rush, loved it. That was my husband's song of the summer, by the way, Rush, in 2023. But Rush was named after the most popular popper's brand, which is also called Rush.
All of this shows how ingrained poppers are in gay culture, but also how their reach goes beyond gay culture. kind of making their way into the broader culture. Talk to us about poppers as a cultural symbol, Alex.
in pop culture, right? Like, there's symbolic shorthand for, I'm having a good time. I'm going out dancing. I'm going to maybe a queer party where the queer people will be there and will be silly. Also, there's, like, the undertone of sex.
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Chapter 2: How have poppers become a part of gay culture?
Like a little bit of a panic around misuse.
Yeah, possibly. But I talked to an FDA law professor, Nathan Cortez, at Southern Methodist University. And I asked him, like, why would FDA suddenly get interested in poppers? And he was like, the FDA is so under-resourced that what they go after and why is truly random. Like, even in the best of times. Yeah.
He said the decision to make an enforcement action on something that FDA thinks is maybe not good for consumers could be a staffer's cousin got sick and they looked into it. It's like really kind of arbitrary. Really, really arbitrary. And he's like, you know, FDA has gotten things wrong before. And the economic consequences of that have been huge.
Like there was one year where they said, oh, I don't know about cranberries. Like there's something wrong with cranberries. Don't eat cranberries this Thanksgiving. And the whole industry tanked. So there is that. OK.
The other side of it is that the elephant in the room, maybe the reason I think that a lot of people jumped on this report that FDA had come after this poppers company is because poppers is something that the new health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has mentioned. And he has said that poppers are the real cause of AIDS and HIV is not.
Mm, that's not true.
That is not true. Right. It was a guess at the very, very, very, very beginning in the early 80s when healthy, young gay men were coming down with rare cancers. And it was really confusing. There was one paper published in The Lancet that said, you know, we noticed that some of the people who came down with this cancer had used poppers. And of course, it wasn't the poppers.
It was that they were getting AIDS. I think it alarms a lot of people that the new health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has espoused this theory that is long, long, long, long, long debunked. There is also a video clip of him making this connection between poppers and AIDS, a connection that just does not exist.
Again, to be clear, it's an undated video, but it started circulating on the Internet a couple of years ago.
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Chapter 3: What concerns does the FDA have about poppers?
You know, a lot of people have expressed concern that this was yet another red flag from our current administration, that the government was targeting queer people. I wonder, how does cracking down on a substance, consciously or unconsciously, function as a crackdown on culture?
I mean, I think queer people are not unfamiliar with being painted as deviants. That is the rhetoric that has come from the right wing in the last five, ten years. It's just like, oh my gosh, it's a deviant lifestyle, whatnot. Queer people are not strangers being painted in a certain way.
but I do think that like poppers puts people in a weird space of like, if you defend poppers, are you defending like this kind of like illicit lifestyle? Right. And then it becomes this idea of like respectability politics, which like it again, queer people are no stranger to respectability politics.
It's just like the whole fight for like queer rights and like trans rights and equality is like overcoming this idea that like someone who who you don't agree with, who is like maybe as different physically, emotionally, spiritually than you has the same rights as you.
Right.
And so I think the whole idea of like painting someone as a monster or someone who does poppers or painting someone who does drugs, like, Like painting queer people and associating with that like puts us in a weird position where it's like, yes, I would like to defend poppers. Right. And again, you mentioned that they're a gray zone.
And I think that makes it even more complicated of like the legality of it all.
Can I just offer a theory? Go ahead. Oh, yeah, yeah, please go ahead.
The other thing is it affects, like, people's joy, you know, like, fun. You know, for people who are facing all of these kind of political threats that, like, at least you can have your joy, your community, your party, your fun, like, hanging on to that feels even more important. And so I think that that might be another reason why this story kind of took off. Thank you.
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Chapter 4: Why is the connection between poppers and AIDS being discussed?
Does she do poppers?
She does poppers. Well, she and Mindy Kaling make a... So she and Mindy Kaling, Mindy Kaling's her guest, and she's showing Mindy Kaling how to cook or make something. And Mindy keeps referring to Megan as Megan Markle. But then Megan, very awkwardly, very stressfully, corrects Mindy and says, you know, I'm Sussex now. This is our family name.
And in fact, Sussex is actually what appears on her passport.
Why was Mindy Kaling using her full name anyway?
To talk to her?
Listen.
She was like, hey, Megan Markle.
If she ever invites me, I'm still going to call her Meghan Markle.
And if she invites you, she'll correct you. She'll show Mindy Kaling. She doesn't care how famous you are. All right. Well, that's it for But Did You Know? For this week, congratulations to Alex on your win. Oh my gosh.
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