Great article on history of poppers

Posted on Poppers Guide's Forum

Topic created by Rubber
on Wed, 28 Jul 2021 at 06:23

Rubber said on Wed, 28 Jul 2021 at 06:23...

See here:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/davidmack/poppers-factory

Any comments/thoughts?

R. Don said on Wed, 28 Jul 2021 at 09:23...

Fascinating !!!

Mam said on Wed, 28 Jul 2021 at 11:40...

Thanks, Rubber! A very interesting read.

Debbie said on Wed, 28 Jul 2021 at 15:13...

Sam Smith is a man. Good article apart from that factual mistake.

[DUCKS]

Debbie said on Wed, 28 Jul 2021 at 15:14...

https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/09/16/sorry-sam-smith-but-youre-still-a-he/

Nitritespecialist said on Wed, 28 Jul 2021 at 19:20...

Yes...fascinating, well written report. But we didn't get any information on how to make nitrites and what the pitfalls are regarding quality control. I know I've tried poppers with the LVT Langhorne PA address and they were always crap. Maybe they turned to crap sitting on the shelves?

Notice the suggestion that Joe Miller could have killed himself because the Feds were targeting him. Didn't some people on here attack me for that theory?

The writer didn't mention LRM in Canada. I'm pretty sure the head of that operation would not answer any questions or show their little shop of horrors to the world.

Freezer died of AIDS in 1985. I know for a fact if I had done poppers in the 80s, when I lived in Houston, I would also be dead. I would have been a raging bottom slut hitting all the bookstores and bathhouses. That's the health link between poppers and AIDS....poppers can CHANGE sexual behavior drastically. They can make passive bottoms become roaming aggressive bottoms, ceaselessly searching for that next awesome sexual encounter. They do this by making butt sex feel 10 x more pleasurable than it ever could naturally, by not only relaxing the BIG O, but by also creating a surreal, heightened sense of sexual receptivity.

The Professor said on Wed, 28 Jul 2021 at 23:31...

Nice overview; a couple of dings

1. Both Hassing and Freezer were originally bottling Butyl nitrite, to get around the Amyl nitrite by perscription only status. Isobutyl nitrite came along later, once Butyl nitrite was banned in the USA.

2. The article states that "Officials with the Marion County Coroner's Office confirmed to me that Miller died by suicide from “asphyxia due to nitrogen inhalation.” In other words, he inhaled his own poppers until he died.". I've read other reports that also mention the suicide by nitrogen (which displaces oxygen as well as carbon monoxide does, but is evidently less painful to OD on. Alkyl nitrites do involve the element Nitrogen, but the article makes a giant leap that he somehow overdosed on alkyl nitrite.

Toby said on Thu, 29 Jul 2021 at 03:09...

@The Professor: Yeah, that made no sense to me when the article suggested he died by inhaling his poppers!

Unless he deliberately combined it with a massive dose of Viagra or something...

Poor guy, I can understand his panic when the Feds turned up at his workplace and confiscated his laptops.

t said on Thu, 29 Jul 2021 at 08:06...

Don't believe everything. People who are working in grey business are good storytellers.

In matter of fact there was no new information in the article. Perhaps all information was gathered of this forum?

But I noticed that safety of the workers was not good. If nail polish remover of alkyl nitrites was invented and patented because the worker got chemicals on her hands often everything is not as it should be. Alkyl nitrites work trough skin too.

Elvis said on Thu, 29 Jul 2021 at 15:37...

Curious, up in this post there was reference to isobutyl being used due to butyl being banned. Is there a difference in product affect between the two and was butyl probably being used by Joe in his PWD products before possibly being forced to use isobutyl. I ask this because of what I believe to be a noticeable difference in PWD product quality through the 1990s. Going from great to slightly not as great. Something that I noticed anyway.

The Professor said on Thu, 29 Jul 2021 at 18:19...

@elvis:

The whole non-prescription story starts with Butyl Nitrite

from our wiki (with permission)

Types of Alkyl nitrite; what's the difference?

ALL alkyl nitrites share a common active ingredient, Nitric Oxide (NO). The molecule in the link is Isoamyl nitrite, for example. The oxygen-nitrogen-oxygen atoms to the right (the red-blue-red balls) is Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2), which on its own is a highly toxic gas. The entire molecule has a body (the carrier alcohol), a 'neck' (the first oxygen binding to the alcohol) and a 'head' the NO payload.

Nitric Oxide is the active part, but on its own it metabolizes in seconds, so little-to-no lasting effects.

What NO needs is a delivery vehicle, to get the NO into the bloodstream, where it can then do its thing (Endothelial NO (ENO) allows the human bloodstream to dilate in accommodation to blood flow just as pupils dilate in accommodation to light).

This delivery vehicle is the alcohol body and neck of the molecule; once in the bloodstream, the head goes to town, and the body and neck get pissed away.

The difference between the various nitrites is in their rate of delivery of NO. The actual alcohols are only going to be present in parts per million in your blood.

The nitrites with lower vapor pressures have a slower onset, lower high and longer duration, while the more volatile nitrites have a faster onset, higher high and shorter duration.

That is the fundamental difference between all alkyl nitrites, but production factors intervene to mess things up quite a bit.

For example, the lower nitrites tend to have the least 'bad' side effects; mostly because they are easier to make, and a low activity nitrite degrades more slowly. The higher nitrites tend to have more impurities and to deliver NO at faster rates; impurities compound because making them more pure requires more effort than most producers put into the endeavor.

Most producers don't put enough effort into it because it's not a very well regulated situation, and they can get away with practically poisoning you. At most, vendors of noxious nitrites will send a replacement bottle or two if a customer complains a bit, but there isn't enough motivation to actually make a good product in the first place, unfortunately.

Laws vary by country on what's legal to own and what's legal to sell. I'm not going to address that because it changes often enough to obsolete anything I write down about it; check your local/country specific laws.

Labelling is also horribly incomplete and/or false. E.g. when Butyl nitrite (the original non-prescription alcohol used by Freezer and Wheeler when they developed Rush and Lockerroom) was first outlawed in the US, labelling changed to Isobutyl nitrite, but the actual product typically continued to contain Butyl nitrite.

So, you don't really know what's in the bottle, and you don't really know what the best alcohol is for you; what can you do about it?

Strength; what is the strongest or best formula?
The best formula is the one that is most compatible with your metabolism. Molecular weight is a general guideline, but the isomers will also vary in vapor pressure

. Least reactive to most reactive:
n- amyl (Pentyl)-------(72% reactive)(any of the Amyl's are comparatively weak and irritate the throat more than others)
Isoamyl (Isopentyl)-----(75% reactive)
sec-Pentyl
n-Butyl-------------------(81% active)(the Butyl's are the sweet spot for duration and elation)
Isobutyl-----(91% reactive)
sec-Butyl-----(94% reactive)
tert-butyl-----(98.6% reactive)
n-propyl-----------------(104% reactive)(anything higher has potential for macular degeneration due to poor manufacture)
Isopropyl-----(116% reactive)
Ethyl-----(162% reactive)
Methyl

Again, the most reactive might not be most suitable, depending on your physiology. The lower nitrites last longer, but the high is lower, while the higher nitrites go much higher for less time. That's part of the trade off. Amyl is the easiest to produce with less contaminants, due to its lesser reactivity, so side effects are more rare (unless you are huffing highly degraded stuff air shipped from overseas) Amyl is a bit of a teaser, for me, in that it doesn't quite get there. The higher nitrites are a bit more difficult to produce well, but extremely worth it, IMO.

The Professor said on Thu, 29 Jul 2021 at 18:25...

If properly prepared and stabilized, the aroma of any type of alkyl nitrite is very faint. The particularly nasty aromas are from contaminants (eityher from production or degradation, list of possible contaminants in:

http://poppersguide.com/forum/11582

e.g.

the amyls mostly smell like faint banana (amyl acetate smells like banana)

N-Butyl mostly smells like ginger ale (ginger contains butanol)
tert-butanol is quite a bit more reactive with a slightly minty aroma (the fresh-maker!)
the propyls start to smell like acetone

Canuck SB said on Fri, 30 Jul 2021 at 06:28...

@The Professor
Is it normal to get chest congestion from just using Poppers for long sessions or are phlegm and night sweats do to a poorly made product?

Elvis said on Fri, 30 Jul 2021 at 11:46...

Thanks professor !!

The Professor said on Fri, 30 Jul 2021 at 15:09...

@Canuck SB
The longest session 8 can remember was about three hours. It was my product; no raspy throat or congestion at all.

Those effects are usually from improper neutralization of the raw yield. Most manufacturers don't seem to want to neutralize the raw yield, much or at all, since it involves yield loss.

E. G. If you just use baking soda (or washing soda) there will be very slight fizzing, sand one may think they've neutralized all the acid, and there wasn't very much yield loss.

The neutralization step needs water in the yield, and a high spin speed to create a temporary emulsion.

This allows the water soluble washing agent to pull acid out of the nitrite (even better if the washing solution includes salt).

Unfortunately, water is the greatest killer of yield, so not many are doing it properly ($$$).

Residual acid leads to sore throat at least.

Manufacturing impurities are a likely culprit with phlegm, as is a stuffy nose.

Canuck SB said on Fri, 30 Jul 2021 at 17:41...

@The Professor
Thank you kindly good sir for the quick reply i got find me a hobbiest chemist in montreal or canada and do the process better myself,like they if you want it done right you gotta do it yourself !!!!

Elvis said on Mon, 2 Aug 2021 at 11:52...

I also did not know that Joe Miller was not the original founder of PWD products. I thought it was his creation. Come to find out now, it was some dude named Freezer. So Joe was not a chemist who developed that wonderful popper recipe ? It sounds like Joe just continued producing the same product that Freezer had already formulated.

The Professor said on Mon, 2 Aug 2021 at 16:36...

@Elvis.

Correct, Miller took over an already existing product. He became notorious for throwing money around (millions), to various politicians, but he wasn't a chemist.

Elvis said on Tue, 3 Aug 2021 at 11:38...

Thanks for all of your insight Professor. The backstory to all of this is very fascinating. After reading the article a second time, one thing that I did not see mentioned was the possible connection to the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly. Im sure that I remember reading about PWD cherry picking a chemist from Eli Lilly to help with creating the original formula. So if Joe Miller was not a chemist, and the product had already been created and produced. If the Eli Lilly story is correct, then it would have had to have had happen in the Jay Freezer days. But who knows, that may have just been a wild story.

The Dreadful Flying Glove said on Thu, 5 Aug 2021 at 13:48...

Yeah...a wild story that PWD Rush was invented by Miller and was amyl nitrite. Don't believe the conspiracy theorists hereabouts. I think (not sure) he was a retailer at that start, but certainly Rush was born in California, not Indiana.

@The Professor: to be fair he was passionate about gay rights.

@Elvis: Joseph Miller was a marketing guy, a brilliant one. Check out the amazing artwork for example, that is really stunning.

Don't expect the "secret formula" bullshit to go away, it will just transform into a new theory. Rush was amyl, like all poppers in the days of "snappers", but the signature style we all recognize was butyl.

oh yes this is me said on Thu, 11 Jan 2024 at 17:07...

poppers can CHANGE sexual behavior drastically. They can make passive bottoms become roaming aggressive bottoms, ceaselessly searching for that next awesome sexual encounter. They do this by making butt sex feel 10 x more pleasurable than it ever could naturally, by not only relaxing the BIG O, but by also creating a surreal, heightened sense of sexual receptivity.