Why were poppers legal?
Lauritsen: Poppers were originally manufactured by the Burroughs-Wellcome Corp. as a remedy for emergency heart pain, but they were replaced by nitroglycerine. In the ’60s, only a few gay men used poppers as a recreational drug. Poppers found new life during the Vietnam War, sold on the black market to soldiers overseas. When the soldiers came home, they kept up the habit. Reports of blackouts, headaches, blood abnormalities and terrible skin burns forced a reclassification of the drug. In the ’70s and ’80s, the FDA permitted poppers to be legally sold under the ridiculous pretext that they were “room odorizers” – at the same time that the new gay sex industry blatantly marketed them to gay men as aphrodisiacs, under such names as “Rush,” “Hard Ware” and “Ram.” Poppers were cheap, as little as $2.99 per bottle, and they were extremely popular. Every single gay publication at the time was filled with full-page, color ads for the drug. In the ’70s, poppers were a $50 million per year bus
