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The UK wouldn’t be making poppers illegal if they were used for straight sex
We now know for sure that poppers will likely be illegal in the UK from next year – and gay men’s health will be worse off for it.
The government’s Psychoactive Substances Bill is in its final stages in parliament. It is designed to deal with ‘legal highs’ but the way it does so is by banning any ‘psychoactive substance’ from sale or importation unless it is explicitly exempted from the provisions of the law.
Alcohol for example is exempted. But poppers are not.
Barring something very unexpected, it will be a criminal offence to sell poppers and a criminal offence for us to import them even for our personal use (for example buying them online from overseas) from April next year.
This will have a significant impact on the lives of gay men. Evidence suggests that at any one time about one in three gay men have used poppers in the previous four weeks. Are we all just going to stop? That seems unlikely.
Not only do a lot of men get pleasure from the rush of poppers but many men find them important in enabling them to have comfortable anal sex. Use of poppers is for many gay men linked to the pleasure and intimacy of their sex lives and sexual relationships.
What then will gay and bi men do? Poppers of course will still be available but not from licensed sex shops. Men will approach drug dealers or buy from overseas sources.
Not only will it move gay men towards criminal activity, it will mean gay men access unregulated compounds with little knowledge as to their safety.
Over the years, a couple of the compounds used as poppers (the official name for poppers is ‘alkyl nitrites’) have been banned through regulation because they were found to be particularly harmful for health. The compound currently sold is known as isopropyl nitrite and is much safer. There are still low-level risks but good health promotion advice can make such risks readily avoidable.
But who knows what you are buying once everything is equally unlawful and you access poppers from obscure sources. Prohibition means in National AIDS Trust’s view a risk of increased harm to gay men.
NAT gave evidence on poppers to the Home Affairs Select Committee who held an inquiry into the Psychoactive Substances Bill. We called for poppers to be exempted from prohibition. The Home Affairs Committee agreed with NAT – but the government refuses to budge.
We are supporting Members of Parliament as they question the minister on the issue in the Commons. But it looks like we will have to go through the extended process of persuading the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs to make a recommendation to the Secretary of State to add poppers to the list of exemptions – and that may take some time.
I doubt very much that we would be dealing with this if straight people also took poppers to aid them in their sex lives and at a roughly equivalent scale to alcohol and tobacco.
Instead poppers would have been exempted and any harms addressed through public health measures.
The decision to ban poppers reveals an insensitivity to gay and bi men’s sex lives and culture.
They want us to marry… but sex? Not so much.
Yusef Azad is director of strategy at the UK’s National AIDS Trust (NAT).
The post The UK wouldn’t be making poppers illegal if they were used for straight sex appeared first on Gay Star News.
Yusef Azad
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