EXTRAORDINARY EXPOSÉ –
July 27, 2021 – But poppers aren’t exactly a household name, at least when compared to other recreational or sex drugs like molly or Viagra, especially among straight people, even if more of them are using poppers. “Consider poppers the homosexual peyote,” the LGBTQ magazine the Advocate declared in 2013, writing that they have an “open secret status” and that few outsiders “know the first thing about them.”
As it turns out, not many insiders know much about them, either. Where did they come from? Who made them? How did they find their way onto the shelves of sex shops and corner stores? And who was profiting? I decided to find out.
I started with the web address listed on a bottle of Rush; with its red-and-yellow lightning bolt packaging, it’s by far the most recognizable brand. The bare-bones website, belonging to a company called Pac-West Distributing, complained of fake and dangerous imports from China masquerading as the real thing, but listed just one email address for customers to report imitators. “NO OTHER INQUIRES WILL BE ANSWERED, SORRY!” the site warned. All my emails went ignored. When I looked into Pac-West, I stumbled on a series of lawsuits and countersuits between the company and a business in Pennsylvania that had been filed in federal court in 2019.
The yearslong legal dispute is rather mundane and complex — allegations of trademark infringement, breach of contract, and libel — but as I read through Pac-West’s 2019 legal complaint, I noticed something. There, printed in full color — no doubt for the benefit of a judge who probably did not go to law school for this — were pictures of various brands: Iron Horse, Rush, Gold Rush, and Super Rush. But the filings describe the products only as cleaners, incense, or nail polish removers. In their descriptions, attorneys coyly state that the products “have acquired a strong secondary meaning” and are “among the most recognized in the LGBTQ community.” Even the judge, in an interim order, only referred to them as “cleaning products.”
I spent weeks reaching out to the companies and their attorneys. I dug up home numbers for those named in the litigation. No one wanted to talk. Then I dialed the Pennsylvania business one final time.
