Lauritsen and many leading medical researchers and government health officials concluded early in the epidemic that poppers were the lead culprit. Chemists developed amyl nitrite as a vasodilator in the 1850s and began, in the 1960s, packaging it in glass ampules that doctors would pop open under the noses of unconscious patients to reanimate them. That same mechanism that prompted reanimation provided the relaxation of the anal musculature and a powerful rush that made poppers the reigning sex drug.
Poppers became a mainstay of the gay social scene in the late 1970s. Prior to 1987, every AIDS patient acknowledged heavy consumption of poppers.74 Every porn shop, bar, and bathhouse locker room sold poppers.75 Party gays huffed them continuously in dance clubs and during extreme sex. The saloons and dance halls reeked of their pungent chemical aroma. At the end of each evening, bartenders routinely announced, “Last call for alcohol,” “Last call for Poppers.”76 Researchers believe poppers to be the direct cause of Kaposi’s sarcoma, a rare form of skin cancer that afflicts the nose, throat, lungs, and skin.77 Kaposi’s sarcoma was the initial indicator disease of AIDS, but it was also common in gay men who were not infected with HIV.
Poppers can severely damage the immune system, genes, lungs, liver, heart, or the brain; they can produce neural damage similar to that of multiple sclerosis, can have carcinogenic effects, and can lead to “sudden sniffing death.”78
“I discovered there was a very extensive medical literature on the volatile nitrites,” Lauritsen explains. “The simplest thing is that they are very powerful oxidizing agents, which is part of AIDS causes; in fact, several types of anemia. Secondly, poppers are powerfully mutagenic and carcinogenic—meaning that they cause cellular changes and cancer. One of my informants, Filson—who was very active and outgoing in the People With AIDS Coalition—claimed that he had interviewed several hundred gay men with AIDS and he said that virtually all of them had been heavy users of drugs. They said without a single exception. They had all been poppers users.”79 A study published by Toby Eisenstein showed that nitrites found in poppers are radically immunosuppressive in rodents.80
Government researchers and regulatory officials supported the association. Prior to Gallo’s announcement, CDC had targeted poppers as the likely culprit for AIDS. A year before Gallo’s announcement, CDC’s in-house AIDS expert Harry Haverkos analyzed three surveys of AIDS patients conducted by the CDC. He concluded that drugs like poppers played a key role in the disease onset. L. T. Sigell wrote in the American Journal of Psychiatry that the inhaled nitrites produced nitrosamine known for its carcinogenic effects—Thomas Haley of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued the same warning.81
Following Gallo’s 1984 press conference, Dr. Fauci launched a mission to quash all conversation about cofactors like poppers. The CDC quickly fell in line. The CDC shelved the Haverkos study and began parroting Dr. Fauci’s hostility toward the drug connection. The CDC actively suppressed disagreeable data and published one of its signature junk science papers to “prove” poppers safe.82 The CDC researchers assumed that gays used poppers as single-use reanimators and exposed laboratory mice to lifetime doses 1/1,000 of what a gay man would get in one evening on the party circuit. The study was “utterly fraudulent,” remarks Lauritsen.83 For a partial list of studies that tested the association of nitrites to AIDS, see Oppenheimer, In the Eye of the Storm, note 34, p. 295.84
Haverkos transferred to the FDA in 1984 to become AIDS coordinator there. His paper finally appeared in the journal Sexually Transmitted Diseases in 1985,85 prompting the Wall Street Journal to pen an article arguing that substance abuse was so universal among AIDS patients that drug use, and not Dr. Fauci’s virus, must be considered the primary cause of AIDS.86
According to Randy Shilts, writing in his classic history of the AIDS crisis, And the Band Played On, the poppers’ starting point offers a “compelling” explanation for AIDS. “Everybody who got diseases seemed to snort poppers,” writes Shilts.87
As I wrote this book, Children’s Health Defense researcher Robyn Ross, Esq., alerted me to one of the unheralded ironies of this saga. As it turns out, Burroughs Wellcome holds the 1942 patent on the popper container and remained one of the largest manufacturers of poppers during the 1980s and ’90s. As early as 1977, a New York Daily News article described Burroughs Wellcome strategies for dodging criticism of widespread health injuries from its booming popper sales. As we shall presently see, Burroughs Wellcome and other popper manufacturers were the principal sources of advertising revenues to the gay press during that epoch, and they used that leverage to force censorship of any journalist attempting to link amyl nitrite to immune system collapse. If Duesberg and others are correct about that association, it means that Burroughs Wellcome was profiting from both causing the AIDS epidemic and then from poisoning a generation of gay men with the AZT “Cure.” Tony Fauci played traffic cop in this feedback loop. On the one hand, he was using his regulatory authority to promote AZT, and to kill its competition, effectively orchestrating Burroughs Wellcome’s monopoly control over AIDS treatment. At the same time, he was suppressing the study of the toxicity of poppers and directing the blame for AIDS on the virus, thereby shielding Burroughs Wellcome from significant liability.
Kaposi’s Sarcoma
In 1990, four leading scientists at the CDC suggested in the Lancet that Kaposi’s sarcoma was common in young gay men who indisputably did not have HIV. They concluded that KS—the disease most central to the definition of AIDS—“may be caused by an as yet unidentified infectious agent, transmitted mainly by sexual contact.”88