Poppers Limited data

Limited data

Sparse data. Doses and effects may be unreliable or untested.

• 1 source
• no dose data
• duration data present
• toxicity data (PsychonautWiki)

Summary PsychonautWiki

Poppers are alkyl nitrites — volatile liquids inhaled from the bottle for a brief, intense rush. They are vasodilators rather than classical intoxicants: they relax smooth muscle throughout the body, which is why the effect is a head rush, facial flushing, a pounding heart and relaxation of the anal and vaginal sphincters, and why it is over in minutes. Effects begin within seconds and are gone in one to five. European products have mostly contained isopropyl nitrite since isobutyl nitrite was banned as a carcinogen in 2007. Two things carry nearly all of the risk. Poppers must never be swallowed — a single small bottle can be lethal, and swallowing is now the more common way people are poisoned by them. And they must never be combined with erectile-dysfunction drugs such as Viagra or Cialis, a combination named as an absolute contraindication on the drugs’ own labelling.

Dose Information

Dose basis. There is no dose ladder for poppers and none can be built: the substance is inhaled from the bottle until it takes effect, and no source anywhere states a recreational dose in milligrams or millilitres. What harm reduction services publish instead is a duration heuristic — TripSit and CAHMA both advise no more than about five seconds per inhalation, and Erowid describes four to six inhalations as typical. Strength varies between brands and between batches, and an opened bottle degrades. The after-effects row covers the physiological tail — flushing, headache and a fast heart rate outlast the subjective effect.

Onset, Duration & After-effects PsychonautWiki

Effects Erowid

Aggregated from 13 single-substance Erowid experience reports; 10 Erowid reports where another drug was taken too are left out

Each bar shows the share of analyzed reports whose text mentions that effect — a mention is not always a first-hand experience (fear of an effect or something witnessed can count). Mentions saying the effect did not happen are left out; that check reads keywords, so it can miss some. The shaded band on a bar, and the small range after its number, is the 95% interval: where the share could plausibly be with other reports of the same kind. Fewer reports, wider band. Tap or hover any number for details. The second value is the Bluelight extractor's per-effect confidence; a dash means the row is Erowid-derived, which has no confidence measurement.

Too few reports for bars: these effects come from 13 single-substance Erowid reports, and a bar is drawn only from 20 reports or more. With fewer, a percentage cannot tell a common effect from a rare one. Counts are shown instead. Why 20?

Also reported in combinations. In the 10 Poppers reports where another drug was taken too, 1 mentions hospital, emergency services or an overdose, 0 a seizure and 0 psychosis (too few reports for percentages). In the 13 single-substance reports: 3, 0 and 0. These are not in the figures above: they cannot be put down to Poppers alone, and a mention is not always something that happened to the writer.

Combinations

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