I thought the controversy over poppers had been settled and was well behind us. Apparently not.

By chance it is a topic I found myself having to learn a lot about back in the 1980s when I was doing a great deal of gay activism which then turned into AIDS activism.

During that time (1982-1990) I served as the Research Director of the Illinois Gay and Lesbian Task Force and served as well on the state of Illinois AIDS Interdisciplinary Advisory Council (appointed by the state Dept. of Health) and the City of Chicago AIDS Advisory Council. Remember that early in the AIDS epidemic, before HIV was discovered by Luc Montagnier's laboratory, people came up with all sorts of theories about what caused AIDS. Noting that gay men disproportionately got the disease, some people thought it must be some fungus in the air conditioning systems of gay bathhouses. Others suggested it might be poppers. Others thought it must be supposedly immune suppressive effects of semen. Or another manifestation of syphilis. And on and on.

Many of these theories and more were proposed and promoted (at the same time) by a gay newspaper in New York which continued to claim that these things caused AIDS even after HIV was discovered. The paper does even not now acknowledge that HIV causes AIDS.

(The same newspaper also promoted various alleged therapies and cures, from Japanese mushrooms, to something made from pond scum, to high doses of penicillin, to repeated shots of typhoid fever vaccine, and so forth.) Those of us at the Illinois Gay and Lesbian Task Force took our obligation seriously and tried to look into all of these theories to see if they had any merit. My job as Research Director was to try to obtain additional information for the board to work with, more than was in the newspapers at the time.

Most of the medical journal articles touching on poppers turned out to be laughable and hardly evidence of immune suppression. Some people were harmed by drinking a bottle, or by falling down and hurting themselves if they inhaled large amounts and became dizzy.

Even studies that supposedly tested for immune suppression all used massive amounts of poppers in tests with mice, giving the poor little mice massive amounts that would be equal (for their body weight) to 100 to 200 times what any gay men would normally use on any occasion.

And the mice were often given the poppers continuously for long periods, so there was no opportunity for their bodies to recover whereas humans use it intermittently and their bodies resume normal condition in a few minutes. Yet other studies used "nude" mice, that is mice that have been genetically altered so that they do not have an immune system to begin with. How any tests using poppers could prove something about immune suppression in mice that do not have an immune system to begin with was beyond us.

In other words, the studies that were being done were not a realistic test of anything that happens in the real world.

Bruce Voeller, the first head of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, who later became head of the Mariposa Foundation (and the man who gave AIDS its name), also looked at some of the poppers studies and pointed out how massive the amounts of poppers used in the mice experiments were. If you gave an adult human such proportionately scaled up doses of aspirin, they would die, Voeller pointed out. Ditto most vitamins and even most necessary trace minerals. What, Voeller wondered, was the agenda of these researcher?

One particular study I remember investigating was conducted at a prominent Colorado research facility. The scientist gave massive amounts of poppers continuously over a long period to a few mice and cheerfully reported that the mice got sick. The study was not peer reviewed. It was not published in a peer reviewed journal. It was not published at all. But his institution hired a large public relations firm to promote the study as showing that poppers could cause AIDS. (The New York gay newspaper printed the press release verbatim -- and many other gay and lesbian papers around the country picked up on the story as a result, further spreading misleading information.)

The Gay Task Force wrote to the scientist to ask about the amount of poppers used, the duration of exposure, the pre-trial condition of the mice, the quality of the poppers, what a comparable dose would be if given to a human, &c. the sorts of things that should be included in a published article having any claims to credibility.

When the scientist refused to reply to repeated inquiries, the Task Force wrote to the president of the research facility summarizing its concerns about the integrity of the study. Forthwith came a long, anguished, extremely defensive response, written in broken English, from the researcher who clearly was not happy being challenged.

"I am hurt and angry at your questions" he began, but then refused to give the Gay Task Force much information about his "research," asked how dared we challenge his "findings" and ended up saying, "We did not say, and it was not our intention to say that IBN [iso-butyl nitrite] causes the AIDS disease"-a total reversal of his previous position.

I remember reading this letter to an appalled Task Force board meeting. When I was finished, the board members started laughing and, as I recall, the claim about the immune suppressive tendencies of poppers never came up again. But, of course, the public relations firm never sent out a correction, the research institution never sent out a correction, and the New York gay newspaper never printed a retraction (though we sent them a copy of the researcher's letter).

That long anecdote pretty much summarizes my repeated experience in trying to track down the alleged "scientific" evidence for "the immune suppressive effects" of poppers. Most of it is politics with an agenda combined with misapplied science.

It seems worthwhile to add that in all the years I went to the city and state AIDS advisory council meetings, no one ever brought up poppers as having any impact on AIDS or causing any immune suppression-not public health officials, not gay community physicians, not AIDS researchers, not biochemists, not community activists.

It may be useful to add here what drug expert Andrew Weil, author of The Natural Mind and other books, recently wrote in HotWired Magazine. He notes that all nitrites are poisonous in excess (remember the mouse experiments) but then explains:

"But when inhaled, amyl nitrite breaks down easily and leaves the body quickly. It's been considered one of the safest drugs in medicine. "As with anything else, it's wise not to overdo it. Potential side effects include nausea, headaches, and dizziness. . . . .Be careful not to get it in your eyes, and don't use it in situations requiring muscular coordination (like driving) or in combination with depressants (like alcohol). Finally, make sure you get plenty of fresh air afterward to flush the chemical out of your system."

And that certainly seems like sound cautionary advice no one could disagree with.

I need to be clear here. No one is claiming, and no one needs to claim that poppers are "good" for you, or "wise" to use in the sense that foods have nutritional value or exercise is "good" for you. The conclusion here is simply that poppers are not "bad" for you (as they are ordinarily used by gay men) in the way that some people speculated that they were before HIV was discovered. Despite a great deal of huffing and puffing and some very inflammatory and possibly libelous language to the contrary, the scientific evidence simply is not there in the medical literature.

There are lots of serious problems to worry about in the world, and a lot of things that harm people, and that people do to harm themselves. And there is much that needs to be done to help people with AIDS and to help those who foolishly place themselves at risk for contracting the disease. But running a hostile agenda on poppers contributes nothing to that effort.

©Paul Varnell Chicago

Paul Varnell writes a weekly column for the Chicago Free Press and other gay newspapers.

He has also written for Reason magazine, the Advocate, Lambda Book Report, and the Chicago Reader. Some of his essays were included in Beyond Queer (Free Press, 1996) and The Bedford Guide for College Writers (Bedford, 1999).
Varnell has been involved in gay advocacy for more than two decades. He headed the education committee of the Gay/Lesbian Union in DeKalb, Illinois, 1977-1982, was a board member of Parents and Friends of Gays in Chicago, 1983-84; and chaired the Media Committee of the Illinois Gay and Lesbian Task Force in Chicago, 1983-1990. He was a co-founder of Gay History Month in 1994.
He was a member of the Chicago AIDS Task Force and was appointed to the Illinois Department of Health's AIDS Advisory Committee.His areas of interest include class ical music, gay history, political philosophy, libertarian theory, and socio-economic analysis.

Many of Paul Varnell’s previous columns are posted at the Independent Gay Forum