The Poor Man’s Cocaine

Poppers in the 70s: From Dirty, Little Secret to a $50 Million Industry

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Poppers in the 70s

Part three of The Bottom Molecule series. Researched and written by Leo Herrera. The Birth of Poppers & Poppers in the 60s.

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You are a little brown bottle in 1975. 

You’re dangling off a balcony over Bourbon Street in New Orleans, in the sultry heat of August, tight in the sweaty hands of a closeted fisherman getting pounded during Southern Decadence. You’re on top of a float in the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade, in the hands of a Sister of Perpetual Indulgence, her habit swaying in the cool ocean air. You’re in the musty Anvil bar in the Meatpacking District in New York, under the nose of a man getting fisted on a slippery sling. Then you’re in the Upper East Side apartment of a chic marketing executive in heels who passes you to the two men she’s about to have sex with. You’re in a recording studio in Nashville then on stage at a rock concert in Austin. A porn shoot in the San Fernando Valley then the theater it’s playing at in Times Square. Under a disco ball in Mancuso’s loft, balloons raining down on you. You’re in a smoke shop in Portland next to a hand-drawn $5 sign and into the backpack of a high schooler who takes a big whiff and passes you under the bleachers. You finish your days in the cozy night stand of a Gay man in Provincetown and Fire Island, next to the lubricant, the sound of waves outside your window. 

The 1970s are seared in the Queer imagination. How could they not be? That post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS “Golden Era” of Gay Liberation, Pride parades, disco, leather clubs, mainstream porn, bathhouses…we’re only born once! Except that’s not really our birth is it? Queer culture existed and was celebrated long before. In America we have records and images of Gay gatherings and drag queens back to 100 years before Stonewall. But the metamorphosis Queer culture underwent in the 1970s was so strong that it felt like a birth. Our bars, pornography, sodomy (mostly) legalized. We created electronic dance music and entire adult entertainment industries. Pop culture legitimized our “alternative lifestyle” at a scope it had not allowed itself to before. A community which knew so little of its history can’t be faulted for viewing that decade as our Big Bang. 

Most of us see the 70s as the birth of poppers too, appearing out of nowhere into the mainstream: Al Pacino in leather, dancing with a poppers-doused bandana in his mouth in Cruising. Poppers (as Amyl Nitrite) had been around since the 1860s as a heart medication. It was in the 1970s that their use went from an open secret into a cultural icon and not just for Gay people.

This is from a Wall Street Journal cover story on Poppers in 1977: "At a chic New York nightclub, a trendy East Side couple take turns sniffing a colorless liquid from a small bottle, then start to giggle as a warm red glow suffuses their faces. A Los Angeles businesswoman, in the middle of a particularly hectic public-relations job, confides "I could really use a ‘popper' now." And at San Francisco's latest in disco, young men pass around metal inhalers, breathe in deeply and start dancing even more frenetically to the pounding musical beat."

At the start of the 1970s, Poppers had their most important transformation: With the wave of a chemist’s magic wand, Amyl Nitrite became Isobutyl Nitrite. The heart medication in glass ampoules which “popped” found their forever home in a brown bottle. Their name stuck. 

In 1970, entrepreneur Jay Freeze copied the formula for Isobutyl Nitrite from Clifford Hassing’s Lockeroom brand in Los Angeles. Jay founded PWD in San Francisco, a company which still exists today. He sought out to make his own brand Rush ubiquitous. He succeeded. An aggressive marketing campaign put Rush in record stores, head shops and adult boutiques, featuring the mascot Captain Rush. It was sold as a “room odorizer” and “liquid incense.” Full page ads in Queer publications featured war scenes and hyper-muscled men, the aggressive, desperate masculinity of the time. The soldiers and bombs were most likely a reference to the Vietnam War where Poppers were allegedly used to treat “gun fumes.” Popper accessories like chain holders were sold in the backs of magazines along snuff boxes and mother-of-pearl cocaine kits.

PWD became the largest manufacturer of Poppers in the world, with brands Rush, Hardware and Ramrod. The charismatic Jay Freeze was the undisputed King of Poppers. He told the press “If Safeway customers want the product, I don't see why it couldn't be sold there.” Jay touted studies on the safety of Poppers, a disingenuous statement as the studies were funded by his own company. Time magazine reported that “an estimated 5 million Americans regularly inhale the chemical, both on the dance floor and later in bed.” 

The popularity of nitrites led The National Academy of Sciences to study their aphrodisiac effects. In 1975 they reported that "Amyl Nitrite was rated high by a population of users to bring about an especially powerful and overwhelming orgasm." The generation of key parties and wife-swapping in the afterglow of the 60s had found their official aphrodisiac. By 1978 poppers were a $50 million dollar a year industry, though the figure was likely much higher. The clandestine venues they were sold in, adult bookstores, smoke shops, bathhouses and Gay bars, meant sales had ties to organized crime and records could be spotty at best.

The bright colors of the Rush bottle and its $5 price tag made them irresistible to teenagers, becoming the JUUL of their time. States had to step in to combat the sale to minors because the federal government’s hands were tied. They were sold as an industrial solvent and therefore outside the jurisdiction of the FDA and the DEA. Poppers would not become a controlled substance until the 1980s. In 1977, a suit in the California Superior Court tried to get Rush off the market. Connecticut used the state’s Child Protection Ban. Texas, Wisconsin, Georgia also tried to ban poppers. Jay Freeze was relentless in defending his product. He enlisted a phalanx of doctors and lawyers. Only Massachusetts managed to ban Butyl Nitrites. In 1978 the California case ended with a temporary injunction against Rush. PWD created Bolt, with a slightly different molecular structure and ad campaign. Poppers went back on the shelves. California officials and other states eventually gave up. Were it not for Jay Freeze’s perseverance and deep pockets, Poppers may not have become what they are today.

Shirt from the ‘70s with the logo from the ‘30s. Ram re-brand, circa 1978. Captain Rush’s last appearance in 2010. Gold, papaya-scented cleaner, 2023 (purchase here)

Amyl Nitrite may have been created in Europe a century before but Poppers as an icon is a quintessential American story: ingenuous young men creating an industry out of an untapped need and cheap materials. Like most American stories, it doesn’t happen in a racial vacuum. It’s important to note how much race plays a part in the history of Poppers. Their journey from medicine to party drug relies heavily on white privilege. Its medical discovery was for a problem affecting upper class white men at the turn of the century: chest pains brought on by changes in diet and environment during the Industrial Revolution. At that time, white supremacy was baked into science. Phrenology and racial eugenics studied alongside the theory of evolution. 100 years later it was the bullish legal maneuvers and resources of white men which allowed Poppers to thrive in a semi-legal limbo. They were advertised in mostly white Gay magazines and featured mostly white models. One can only imagine how different their trajectory may have been if it had been Black or Mexican men synthesizing inhalants in their basements or if they had been marketed to a Black audience, as Hennessy was during that time. Would the law have been so lenient then?

“The Poor Man’s Cocaine…No one really knows if the little amber bottles hold paradise or death. For now, it’s Russian roulette on a $5 bill.” Feb. 5, 1980, Willamette Week.

By the end of the 1970s, the rampant drug use which defined the decade was under a microscope. Gay activists started to sound the alarm on the psychological dependence of Poppers and the possible dangers. Their proximity to hedonism and specifically Gay anal sex, would make them the first suspect of a mysterious cancer at the start of the 80s. AIDS would wipe out so many of the industries and infrastructure Queer people created in the 70s. One look at the back of a vintage Gay magazine shows thousands of bathhouses, bars, clubs, bookstores, stores, hotels, travel agencies, non-profits, brands, businesses and churches. Depending on how we view the era, the end of the 70s was the start or the decline of a new movement, with Poppers as the scent of a Queer empire.