Deep Sniff

Adam Zmith traces the surprisingly winding history of poppers, the volatile liquid whose fumes people inhale for a brief, intense rush. The story starts in a Victorian infirmary and moves through the sex clubs of the 1970s, following the substance as it left the laboratory and turned up in gay bars, corner shops, private bedrooms and compilation videos of pornography.

Writing with both archival rigour and a dry, observant voice, Zmith charts the cultural currents and unexpected connections that gave poppers their hold on people. Along the way he covers police raids on pubs, fast-spreading waves of moral panic and the exaggerated physiques the drug became associated with. The book uses poppers as a way into bigger questions about identity, desire, utopian thinking, capitalism, the law, personal freedom and the ways our bodies register the world.

What begins as a careful study of one drug gradually grows into an argument in favour of pleasure.