The War on Poppers Started Long Before RFK Jr. Took Over HHS 

Get a whiff of this: the feds are coming for your poppers. 

In recent weeks, federal investigators have been cracking down on manufactures of the popular liquids commonly used as inhalants in the queer community, seizing supplies and forcing businesses to shutter. The clampdown on poppers, which have long occupied something of a legal grey area, has led to speculation on social media and in the LGBTQ press that the initiative is a new one being spearheaded by Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a proponent of the false claim that poppers cause AIDS. But one prominent manufacturer tells Rolling Stone the federal crackdown has been brewing for years, stretching back to the administration of President Joe Biden. 

News of the federal enforcement first broke late last week when Double Scorpio, a boutique manufacturer of what they called “tape cleaner,” announced that they had shut down after eight years of operation following a “search and seizure” at their Austin, Texas office by agents with the Food and Drug Administration. “We don’t have a lot of information to share but we believe that the FDA has performed similar actions towards other companies recently,” read a statement shared on the Double Scorpio website. (The Double Scorpio raid was first reported by Fast Company.)

A Double Scorpio spokesperson tells Rolling Stone exclusively that representatives from the FDA, U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), and Department of Justice turned up at their facility with “no prior warning.” The spokesperson said the raid happened on Feb. 23, less than two weeks after Kennedy was sworn in as health secretary, which would amount to an extraordinarily fast turnaround for such an operation had it been new administration policy. 

Mary Toro, the former director of regulatory enforcement at the CPSC, tells Rolling Stone that any seizures of poppers inventory can only typically occur after testing is able to confirm that the liquid being sold is among the controlled chemical compounds. “It’s not something that’s done quickly,” Toro says. 

Everett Farr, who told BuzzFeed News in a lengthy 2021 profile that his Pennsylvania company manufactures “nail polish remover,” confirmed his business had also been the subject of a federal investigation. However, Farr said this probe had first begun several years ago under the Biden Administration. “My issues started before Kennedy [took over HHS]. It’s been going on for two-and-a-half to three years. Kennedy has nothing to do with it. It’s up to the lawyers now,” Farr tells Rolling Stone.

Farr says that federal agents had also recently come to his business, but this occurred in January, a few days before the inauguration of President Donald Trump. “The investigation so far has been straightforward, professional, and courteous,” he adds. 

Other companies have also been impacted. Nitro-Solv, an online retailer of popular brands like Rush, announced on their website that they had ceased operating altogether. (Emails sent to an address on the former website were not returned). The owner of Pac-West Distributing, one of the manufacturers of the popular Rush brand, did not respond to requests for comment, but has taken down most of his website, replacing it with just a GIF of company logos.

Investigations into, and prosecutions of, poppers manufacturers and vendors have occurred before. Toro, the former CPSC director, tells Rolling Stone that in her three decades with that agency it was also not uncommon for regulators to investigate multiple companies at once for selling poppers. 

A spokesperson for the FDA, which has previously warned people not to purchase or use poppers because of the small risk of injury or death, declined to comment, noting that “the FDA does not comment on possible criminal investigations.” Representatives at the Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment.

For over half a century, poppers have been used as a recreational drug, especially among gay men who inhale their vapor in part to loosen the anal muscles during sex. (One 2020 study estimated that over a third of gay men had used the drug.) But they’re also common on dancefloors with revellers, including young and straight people, seeking a brief, dizzying head rush.

Since the late 1980s, the federal government has outlawed the sale of butyl and alkyl nitrites, two of the chemical compounds that are commonly bottled as poppers. But the law has also made commercial exceptions for non-inhalant use of the chemicals under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. This led to most manufacturers branding their liquids as things like tape/VCR cleaner or nail polish remover not intended for human consumption in order to continue selling their goods. For decades, the feds predominantly chose to only target businesses that expressly marketed their products as poppers intended for inhalation, concentrating their enforcement efforts on more dangerous drugs. But that uneasy truce with other “liquid” manufacturers now appears to be over. 

“This is BIG BAD news for poppers users,” Adam Zmith — author of Deep Sniff, a book about poppers and past attempts to regulate them — posted to Bluesky on Friday, before adding, “It’s happened before, too.”

Even if this new crackdown is not the work of Kennedy, it is unlikely to stop under his tenure as head of the department that oversees the FDA. Among the litany of scientific misinformation Kennedy has spread is the false claim that poppers cause AIDS. In a 2021 book attacking Dr. Anthony Fauci, Kennedy promoted the falsehood “that heavy recreational drug use in gay men and drug addicts was the real cause of real cause of immune deficiency among the first generation of AIDS sufferers.” He specifically cited poppers, which he described as “a popular drug among promiscuous gays.” In 2023, the social media account Patriot Takes also shared footage of Kennedy telling an audience, “100 percent of the people who died — the first thousand who had AIDS were people who were addicted to poppers.” In fact, as scientists Luc Montaigner and Françoise Barré-Sinoussi long ago discovered (and were subsequently honored with Nobel Prizes for their work), AIDS is caused by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV).

News of the sudden crackdown has caused alarm in the queer community, prompting some to suggest they might begin to amass a “strategic stockpile reserve” of poppers. As podcaster and author Ira Madison wrote on Bluesky, “Prohibition era but for poppers.”