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The next generation of new club poppers has hit the scene, and these are not the same old party drugs used in the past. New poppers are being found in many clubs around the country, and even the globe, but these party drugs carry very high risks and can contain unknown and even dangerous chemicals. Poppers in the past meant alkyl nitrates, a drug that is supposed to make sex more pleasurable, but the new club poppers may contain little of this original substance if they contain any at all. According to researchers these new party drugs often contain solvents and propellants which can be harmful or even fatal, and researchers warn that gay men may be at a higher risk because gay clubs are where these party drugs are found most often.

Research on the new club poppers have shown that these new party drugs are actually solvents used for huffing in many cases, and these solvents can pose very serious health risks and even cause death in some cases. The research results were published in the Journal of Gay and Lesbian Mental Health, and it focuses on the gay male community because this is the group that used the alkyl nitrate poppers in the past. University of California researcher Dr. Timothy Hall led the study, and in a news release he stated “Doctors are taught almost nothing about regular nitrite poppers. They’re little more than a footnote at the back of most addiction textbooks, lumped in with sniffing glue and huffing aerosols, even though the physiologic effects are quite different. Gay and bisexual men, on the other hand, have little exposure to huffing but tend to think of nitrite poppers as fairly benign. There’s a real risk here for [gay men] to be taking a much more harmful substance than they’re expecting, and for clinicians not to recognize the difference.”