Poppers, the FDA, & a crackdown decades in the making
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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. And I think, like, the whole pop cultural, like, ephemera of, like, Charlie XCX sniffing poppers kind of makes it, like, this tongue-in-cheek joke about people who know what poppers are. So when you have this, like, serious story of an FDA rig allegedly going after business... I think there's this kind of like initial shock that's kind of like, okay, well, why?
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