There, printed in full color - no doubt for the benefit of a judge who probably did not go to law school for this - were pictures of various brands: Iron Horse, Rush, Gold Rush, and Super Rush. The yearslong legal dispute is rather mundane and complex - allegations of trademark infringement, breach of contract, and libel - but as I read through Pac-West’s 2019 legal complaint, I noticed something.
When I looked into Pac-West, I stumbled on a series of lawsuits and countersuits between the company and a business in Pennsylvania that had been filed in federal court in 2019. The trademark attorney who filed the application promised to pass on my request to Pac-West’s owners, but I heard nothing. The address listed was a PO Box in a strip mall in Las Vegas. Its date of first use traced all the way back to Dec. Sure enough, there was the Rush lightning bolt, registered to Pac-West Distributing. Next, I searched the US Patent and Trademark Office database, figuring any company angry about knockoffs probably has a registered trademark. “NO OTHER INQUIRES WILL BE ANSWERED, SORRY!” the site warned. The bare-bones website, belonging to a company called Pac-West Distributing, complained of fake and dangerous imports from China masquerading as the real thing, but listed just one email address for customers to report imitators. I started with the web address listed on a bottle of Rush with its red-and-yellow lightning bolt packaging, it’s by far the most recognizable brand. Where did they come from? Who made them? How did they find their way onto the shelves of sex shops and corner stores? And who was profiting? I decided to find out. “Consider poppers the homosexual peyote,” the LGBTQ magazine the Advocate declared in 2013, writing that they have an “open secret status” and that few outsiders “know the first thing about them.”Īs it turns out, not many insiders know much about them, either. Charli XCX autographed a bottle for a fan, held it up to the camera, and yelled, “Gay rights!”īut poppers aren’t exactly a household name, at least when compared to other recreational or sex drugs like molly or Viagra, especially among straight people, even if more of them are using poppers. There was a joke about Liberace doing poppers in the first episode of HBO’s Hacks. Sam Smith said they did them with the lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls (producing the truly incredible headline: “ Nicole Scherzinger Loosened Up Her Buttons With Poppers at a Gay Bar”). Poppers have also become more culturally prominent. But it’s also not uncommon for groups of men (and sometimes their straight friends) on a dance floor to pass them around semi-discreetly, enjoying the giddy, two-minute high together, one nostril at a time. When their vapor is inhaled, poppers create a sudden, brief rush of passion that can - crucially, for many gay men - help to loosen the anal muscles. They are, first and foremost, a sex drug. Today, the small brown bottles feel somehow both ubiquitous yet scandalous. When I asked Zmith if there was an equivalent product in straight culture, he quipped, “Mortgages? Children?”
“I think there’s a sense of ownership, that this is ours,” said Adam Zmith, a British writer set to release a book this year about poppers and the gay community, Deep Sniff. Their sharp chemical scent evokes both sex and dancing - two activities that can be communal experiences for gay men. In that time, they have become an almost defining product. It’s been roughly 50 years since poppers emerged as a recreational drug in the gay community. That while almost every gay man could name the drug, very few could tell you exactly what is in it or where it comes from?Īnd that this drug - poppers - will probably give you some of the most intense, room-spinning, holy-shit-I’m-going-to-come sex you could possibly imagine?
That the feds know about this hush-hush trade but mostly look the other way? What if I told you that right now you could walk into any one of thousands of stores across the US and buy a drug that’s been banned by the government?