Windy City Times/Thursday, March 30, 1989
Paul Varnell
Observer's Notebook
Poppers: Less Than Meets the Eye
That body of collective scientific expertise, the United States Congress, has by legislative fiat declared Isobutyl Nitrite (IBN) Poppers a "banned, hazardous product," illegal to manufacture, sell, or distribute. The ban was placed into the 1988 Omnibus Drug Act by Representative Henry Waxman (D California) at the urging of Representative Mel Levine (D-California) who had been heavily lobbied by a self-styled "AIDS activist" hank Wilson, head of the one man committee to Monitor Poppers. However:
- The new law does not forbid possession or use of IBN poppers, so if you can get them, you can use them and even carry them around.
- At this point at least one manufacturer of IBN poppers has gone to court and received a temporary restraining order to keep the law from being enforced against its products.
- Some poppers manufacturers, including Great Lakes Products,Inc have already started manufacturing and selling poppers made with other nitrites (e.g., Isopropyl nitrite), and those are entirely legal to make, buy and sell.
The politics of such a ban, or prohibition, are interesting to contemplate. For instance:
- Do Levine and Waxman and Wilson actually think such a ban will work? IBN poppers are not that hard to manufacture, so we may be in for a supply of "bathtub poppers" by underground network, as well as God-Knows-What substances in plain bottles representing themselves as IBN poppers. Does anyone think this is a clear gain?
- Isn't there some sort of personal liberties issue here? What about the argument that "It's my body" and that I have the moral right to control what goes into it and what stays out of it?
- When cigarettes were shown (shown!) to be harmful, we put warning labels on the package giving the medical evidence and then let people make their own decisions - and the claims against cigarettes are substantially stronger than any claims against poppers. Whatever happened to freedom of choice here?
- Representative Levine has an ADA rating of 95 percent. Scratch a progressive, find a fascist.
The law offers no rationale for its criminalization, only saying that the substance is banned when it is manufactured for use for "euphoric or physical effects. " What everybody knows, however, is that the claims have been repeatedly made that IBN poppers are "somehow" involved as a cause either of AIDS itself (1981-1984) or, the somewhat retrenched position, as a cause of Kaposi's sarcoma (1984-present), or, the even more retrenched position, as a "cofactor" (i.e., not a primary cause) in the development of KS (about 1986-present). These claims seem doubtful because:
- We all know lots of people who have KS who have used little or no poppers in their lives; and we all know heavy poppers users who do not seem to have KS.
- As one physician pointed out to me, if IBN poppers caused KS, lots of people should have KS of the thumb.
- KS is apparently widespread in Africa, an area not known to be a region of heavy poppers use.
- The largest study of gay men I know of, the Multi-Area Cohort Study by the NIH (of which the Howard Brown study is a part) shows no poppers-KS link.
- The government's own expert on poppers, Harry Haverkos, has been working on the notion of a poppers-KS link for nearly seven years and still cannot confirm such a link; he always talks in terms of "potential" and "could be" and then calls for more epidemiological and laboratory studies. That's pretty much what he was saying years ago.
- Haverkos' own summary of all the IBN studies asserts that--at most--a few small studies seem to suggest an association between heavy (heavy!) poppers use and KS, but then says that other studies show no such link.
Much of the work on poppers seems to be of remarkably poor, astonishingly poor, quality, barely within shouting range of standard scientific method. And the conclusions drawn are frequently far in excess of the evidence offered:
- Some of the laboratory work has involved injecting enormous quantities of IBN into small animals. Other studies have forced inhalation of IBN in high concentrations for hours on end. Yet others have used animals with no immune systems to begin with, so it is hard to know what you could learn about IBN's effects on the immune system. Yet others, still, have used animals (and cited people) with rare genetic defects. By and large this is the sort of evidence that Hank Wilson and his Committee to Monitor Poppers has found convincing.
- When a Denver-based researcher a few years ago sent out a press release claiming to have established a poppers-AIDS link, the Illinois Gay and Lesbian Task Force wrote the researcher a long letter asking a number of probing questions about his study and the methods he had employed, control groups, quantity of poppers used, the capacity of his genetically immune-deficient laboratory animals to re-achieve immune-system homeostasis. The researcher refused to provide a copy of his study and wrote an angry letter ("I am upset and angry about your questions," he wrote) in which he more or less acknowledged the inadequacy of his study and wholly and completely withdrew his claim to have established any AIDS-poppers link: "It is not mentioned, nor is it our intention to say, that IBN causes AIDS, nor does it precipitate or intensify the disease status of the AIDS people [sic]." The press release, however, read: "Studies confirm use of drug increases risks of AIDS" and the flamboyant York Native headlined its reprint of the press release, "Researchers Link Poppers to AIDS." It just makes you wonder, doesn't it.
- If some studies suggest an association between heavy poppers use and KS, it is reasonable to be interested. What needs to be inquired into is whether heavy poppers use is causal or, rather, an accompaniment or marker for other behaviors which place people at risk of developing KS. But government researchers seem extremely squeamish about asking gay men details of their sexual behavior. In the past, heavy poppers use tended to accompany anal sex and fisting, for instance. But it is surprising how incurious researchers have been to research these things.
- Nowadays, I am willing to bet, poppers-like pornography-tend to be used as an accompaniment, or enhancement, of the pleasures of private masturbation-just about the safest sort of sexual behavior I know of. To the extent that is true, if poppers do actually make masturbation more pleasant, then instead of banning poppers, the government-if it had a real interest in the health of gay men-should actually provide bottles of them for free at gay bars.
- Wouldn't that just make William Bennett's day.
©Windy City Times/Thursday, March 30, 1989
