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.
