Amynal Nitrite

Κείμενο VICE Staff

1 Μαρτίου, 2008, 8:00μμ

A dramatic recreation of the winning sniff.

Our friend—let’s call him P—loves poppers. P is a 37-year-old radio and voiceover actor, a volunteer at a suicide helpline, and a poppers enthusiast. Originally the term “poppers” referred to tiny glass bulbs of amyl nitrite that old people would pop under their nose (thus the name) to stop angina. Then gays figured out that they also make your orgasms about twenty-hundred times stronger and by the mid-70s doing poppers was such an integral part the disco scene (both gay and straight) that clubs would dump whole loads of amyl into the vents to save people the trouble of lifting their hands to their faces. Once the government caught on, they tried to curb recreational use by making amyl nitrite prescription only, but this just created a thriving market for all sorts of generic nitrites like isobutyl or cyclohexyl which have the same effect when popped. Then in the 80s a handful of dickheads tried to tie popper use to AIDS and they were finally banned altogether.

Videos by VICE

But poppers survived! To this day you can buy bottles of the lesser nitrites at pretty much any sex shop. They just have to claim they’re “liquid aroma” or “video head cleaner” to make it seem like no one’s using them to get off. Technically they’re all vasodilators, meaning they relax the muscles constricting your blood vessels which leads to a flushed sensation in your head and extremities and for some reason also loosens your sphincter muscles. This is the other reason for their continued popularity with the gay community.There are so many different brands of this stuff, like “Iron Horse” and “Jungle Juice,” we wondered if there was really any difference between them at all. So we invited P over to do sort of like a wine tasting, but with poppers. We lined up 11 bottles procured from gay sex shops all along Christopher Street and gave him some fresh coffee beans to cleanse his palette in between bottles—just like they do at fancy perfume stores. All in all it was a very classy affair. Anyways, here’s what P had to say about the goods, and about popping in general.

The contestants.