Pac-West Distributing: the Rush trademarks, a solvent cleaner that says isobutyl nitrite, and a decade in court

Who they say they are, and what the record says

Pac-West Distributing NV LLC is the company that owned Rush, the best-known brand of poppers in the United States, from 2015 until April 2026. It also owned Super Rush, Gold Rush, Iron Horse, Locker Room, Hardware, Quick Silver, Bolt, Ram and the old house mark of the brand's founder, PWD. Its only public face was a website named after its slogan, neverfakeit.com, and nearly everything on that site was about counterfeits.

How poppers came to be sold as room odorizers and cleaners, the federal bans of 1988 and 1990, and the history of the Rush brand before 2015 are told in this site's deep dive on poppers and its deep dive on not for human consumption labels. This page picks the story up where Pac-West enters it.

The first archived home page under the Pac-West name is from October 2014. “Pac West Distributing is pleased to announce that the complete line of our famous products are in the process of being produced and released”, it said, “after a rocky four years in the hands of others the hands on quality control we are famous for is now back in our hands”.[1] The California Law Review's 2024 survey of the poppers trademark file puts the transfer in the following year: “In 2015, Pac-West was born through a transfer of Grand Canyon's trademarks, and it remains the current owner of Rush and other poppers brands today”.[2] Grand Canyon Products was an Arizona company. Before it, the marks belonged to Great Lakes Products of Indianapolis, which in 1994 paid the Consumer Product Safety Commission a $10,000 settlement over exports of Rush and four sister brands: the agency “accepted a $10,000 civil penalty settlement from Great Lakes Products Inc.”.[3]

Figure 1. The first archived home page under the Pac-West name, October 2014. The banner calls Rush the world's best-selling cleaner; the text says the brands are back after four years in the hands of others. [1]

The trademark register gives the company's legal form and address. Its registrations name the owner as Pac-West Distributing NV LLC, a limited liability company organized in Nevada, at 848 N Rainbow Blvd #5307, Las Vegas, and give a Gmail account as its correspondence address.[4] BuzzFeed News, which tried to reach the company in 2021, described the same address as a mailbox: “the address listed was a po box in a strip mall in las vegas”.[5] The website gave no street address and no phone number. It offered a wholesale link “only if you are a retailer or distributor in the usa”, a form for reporting fakes, and the line “no other inquires will be answered sorry”.[6] In 2016 it named the wholesale route: “our master distributor eugene oregon inc does not export any products”.[7]

The federal courts name one person with the company. Trent Taylor is listed with Pac-West as a party to the 2016 case described below and to the settlement that ended it.[8][9] BuzzFeed News described him in 2021 as the man “who now owns pac west”; he did not answer its questions.[5]

Figure 2. Fifty years of one brand, drawn for this page from the trademark file, the court records and the company's archived site. [10]

What they sell, and what the labels say

The bottles. The company's own line-up, shown on the site from 2014 to 2025, was ten brands: “rush hardware quicksilver locker room ram heavy duty bolt iron horse power pak pellet pwd”.[1] It added a 30 ml size in 2014, “the first time we have ever offered a large version”, and in 2020 a new brand: “redrum is the newest pwd brand”.[1][11] Pac-West presented itself as a licensor. Products were “licensed for distribution through” it, and the test it gave buyers for a genuine bottle was its own name: “if you do not find our legal business name on the product it is imitation”.[6]

Figure 3. The 30 ml line as the company's site showed it in 2016. Every label carries the words solvent cleaner. [12]

Solvent cleaner. Every label said what the bottle was for, and the site insisted on the wording. In 2016: “all of our liquid products are labeled as solvent cleaner not aroma and not nail polish remover”.[7] The 2014 page put the rule in small print under the brand list: “rush and all our other nitrite based products are sold as multi purpose solvent cleaner only we expressly forbid the misuse of our products as inhalants”.[1] The same small print warned against what the bottles are used for in practice: “do not mix nitrites and ed drugs”.[1] The February 2025 bottles carry SOLVENT CLEANER on the label, with a warning that the contents may be fatal if swallowed.[13]

Isobutyl nitrite. From 2020 the site said what was in the bottles. “All of our liquid products are licensed and labeled as solvent cleaner”, the November 2020 page read, and “our contents is clearly stated as isobutyl nitrite not as alcohol acid and water”.[11] The sentence was still there in February 2025, slightly reworded: “our contents is clearly stated as isobutyl nitrite not as a mix of alcohol acid and water”.[13] Buyers saw the same thing on the label. “Almost all versions of rush say isobutyl”, one wrote on Reddit in 2021, and another in the same thread, “so i just bought gold rush and it says isobutyl not isoamyl”.[14] The compound has its own page on this site, isobutyl nitrite.

Figure 4. The sentence this page turns on, November 2020: the bottles are labelled solvent cleaner, and their contents are stated as isobutyl nitrite. [11]

Federal law has a specific word for that chemical. Section 2057a of title 15 provides that “butyl nitrite shall be considered a banned hazardous product”, and defines the term: it “includes n-butyl nitrite, isobutyl nitrite, secondary butyl nitrite, tertiary butyl nitrite, and mixtures containing these chemicals”.[15] The exception is for commercial use, and the statute excludes from it “any commercial purpose other than for the production of consumer products containing butyl nitrite that may be used for inhaling or otherwise introducing butyl nitrite into the human body for euphoric or physical effects”.[15] The solvent-cleaner label is the company's claim to that exception. Whether a bottle labelled that way falls inside it is a question no court has decided for Pac-West's products, as the next section shows. The full statutory history is in the deep dive on not for human consumption labels.

The trademark file: air scent, nail polish remover, incense

A trademark is registered for named goods, and the Rush family has been registered as almost everything except what it is. The 1979 registration that Pac-West held, still live in 2026, covers a “chemical composition sold in an easily openable container as an air scent”.[10] Later marks in the same portfolio cover leather cleaner and nail polish remover,[16] air deodorizers and personal lubricant,[17] and incense.[18] The marks Pac-West filed itself in 2015 and 2016, Rush Original among them, are for all purpose cleaners and cleaning preparations, and claim a first use on December 15, 1976, the year the founder's company first sold Rush.[19] The law review counted the company's portfolio at “around forty trademarks”.[2]

Figure 5. What the bottles are, according to the trademark register: an air scent, room odorizers, nail polish remover, leather cleaner, cleaners and incense. The two applications that named the chemical were abandoned. [20]

Figure 6. The original Rush registration, still live in October 2026. The goods have never changed: a chemical composition in an easily opened container, as an air scent. [10]

Twice, the file named the chemical. In 2015 Pac-West applied to register Bolt and Gold Rush for chemicals, “namely isobutyl nitrite”.[20][21][2] The examiner answered both in January 2016 with a non-final action, and in July the company filed an express abandonment of each.[20] The law review read the office action. It asked for statements of lawful use, under a heading the USPTO uses for cannabis goods, “requirement for additional information marijuana related goods”, and it read the abandonment this way: “in response pac west chose to abandon these trademark applications not seeking to incriminate themselves”.[2] That is the authors' inference. The register records only the dates.

Counterfeits, the subject of the website

The company's site was a warning page more than a catalogue. In 2014 it said that “much of it comes from china”, meaning fake Rush.[1] In 2016, “the market is being flooded with dangerous fake product coming from china”, and it disowned a rival brand by name: “amsterdam is not a pwd product and is fake if it says pwd or rush on the bottle”.[7] It published photographs of bottles with RUSH or PWD embossed in the glass, each stamped FAKE, and told buyers that the genuine bottles were plain.

Figure 7. October 2016. Counterfeits are the subject of almost every page the company published; the test it gives buyers is its own legal name on the label. [7]

By 2019 the tone had hardened: “the low lifes that use our brands without paying for the right are stealing from us plain and simple pox on them”.[6] In 2020 it named two websites, “www bulkaromas com is 100 fake www awjpoppers com is 100 fake”, and said the imitations “may possibly contain dangerous hazardous chemicals”.[11] In February 2025 it was still describing “our ongoing war against fake imports and other look alike products”, with new caps and labels to tell them apart.[13] BuzzFeed News's reporter found the same site in 2021 and summarised it: it “complained of fake and dangerous imports from china masquerading as the real thing”.[5] No laboratory result for any of the fakes was published.

Figure 8. November 2020. A buy-now banner, two rival websites named as fakes, and a new brand, Redrum. [11]

Eight years in court with its former bottler

Not every other Rush bottle was a fake. AFAB Industrial Services, a bottler in Bensalem, Pennsylvania, owned by Everett Farr III, had made Rush under licence since the 1990s, and BuzzFeed News reported in 2021 that “pac west distributing also makes rush products and it takes a careful eye to distinguish the two versions”.[5] The two companies litigated from 2015 to at least 2025.

The first round, 2015 to 2016. AFAB sued Pac-West in a Philadelphia court in December 2015 for defamation and unfair competition; the case was moved to federal court in January 2016, and AFAB also petitioned the USPTO to cancel the Rush, PWD and Power-Pak Pellet registrations.[8][9] “On August 23 2016 the parties entered into a settlement agreement that dismissed the litigation with prejudice”, the court later recounted. Pac-West agreed not to sue AFAB over the Rush-family bottles it was already selling, and AFAB agreed that it “will continue to identify the AFAB company name and” Bensalem, Pennsylvania, on that packaging.[9] Pac-West's site carried a notice explaining the arrangement from 2019: “afab industrial services of bensalem pa the manufacturer of rush fingernail polish remover is allowed by pac west distributing nv llc limited use” of the marks.[6] By 2025 it added that “afab pays no royalties to pwd and is not a licensee of pwd”.[13]

Figure 9. April 2019, two months after the former bottler sued over this page. The small print at the foot explains which Rush bottles say AFAB and why. [6]

Figure 10. The 2016 settlement as the court quoted it in 2020: Pac-West would not sue AFAB over the bottles it was already selling, and AFAB had to put its own name on them. [9]

The second round, 2019 to 2023. In February 2019 AFAB sued Pac-West, saying the neverfakeit.com warnings implied that AFAB's bottles were counterfeit. In August Pac-West sued AFAB and Farr for trademark and trade dress infringement and breach of the settlement.[9][22] Pac-West's amended complaint said it owned “trademarks for its cleaning products nail polish removers incense desiccants and other related products”, and the court opened its first opinion by describing both companies as “sellers and distributors of various cleaning products”.[9] When AFAB argued that the trademarks were unenforceable because the products were really poppers, the judge declined to look: “the Court certainly refrains from speculating as to the legality of” Pac-West's products on that record.[9] The ruling's footnote defining poppers is quoted in the poppers deep dive.

The judge denied AFAB's second motion to dismiss in July 2021.[23] In March 2022 she split the trade dress claims, holding that the 2016 settlement covered Pac-West's “trade dress claims related to the rush super rush and never fake it marks” but not those about PWD and Power-Pak Pellet.[24] One exhibit in that round, AFAB's, put three yellow Rush bottles side by side to argue that “the photos show identical and consistent use of” the marks before and after 2016.[24]

Figure 11. The trade dress fight in one exhibit, March 2022: three yellow Rush bottles, two from the 2016 case and one from 2019. [24]

In May 2023 the court ruled on AFAB's counterclaims, which asked it to cancel Pac-West's registrations because the products were unlawful under the nitrite bans. It declined to adopt what trademark lawyers call the unlawful use doctrine. The opinion reasons that the two statutes give no private right of action, so Congress left their enforcement to the federal government and not to a rival in a trademark case, and it granted Pac-West summary judgment on those counts. It also rejected AFAB's claim that the registrations were obtained by fraud.[25] The two cases were set to be tried together before a jury; in October 2023 the court refused AFAB's request to try them without one.[26] No later ruling on the merits appears in either docket as archived.[22]

Figure 12. May 2023. A private rival cannot use the nitrite bans to cancel a trademark in this court; only the federal government enforces them. [25]

The board, 2023 to 2025. In July 2023 AFAB took the same argument to the USPTO's Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, petitioning to cancel nine registrations, from Gold Rush and Locker Room to Rush Original and Quick Silver.[27] The board suspended the case to wait for the court (“susp pend disp of civil action”), the last time on 2025-02-18. On 2025-03-05 the record shows “w draw of pet for cancellation”, and the next day “bd decision can denied w prej”.[27] The same outcome is entered on each registration, dated March 6, 2025.[19]

Figure 13. AFAB's last attempt to cancel the marks, 2023 to 2025. It was suspended for the court case, then withdrawn in the first week of March 2025. [27]

What buyers report

Pac-West sold to distributors, not to the public, so there are few first-hand accounts of the company itself. The archived Reddit search for Pac-West, PacWest and neverfakeit in r/poppers and r/askgaybros on 2026-10-11 found no thread naming the company. A search for PWD Rush found three relevant threads, all read. In 2015 a buyer asked where to find genuine bottles, having “been burned a couple of times with knockoffs looking for a reliable vendor”; one reply said “pwd has always been reliable afaik”.[28] The 2021 thread quoted above is about what the labels say.[14] Neither is evidence of any one bottle's contents.

Farr, the rival bottler, told BuzzFeed News that the brands differ only on the label: “every single bottle is exactly the same thing”.[5] He had an interest in saying so, and no test has checked it.

Lab results

None. The company published no certificate, assay or test of any bottle in the archived pages read, from 2014 to 2025. Its only statement about contents is the sentence that the label names isobutyl nitrite.[11] A 2023 case report in Cureus describes a man who swallowed “a nitrite containing supplement called rush commonly known as poppers by oral ingestion” and developed severe methemoglobinemia; its title calls the product amyl nitrite, and it does not say who made the bottle or report any analysis of it.[29] What is in a Pac-West bottle, beyond what its label says, has not been published.

Regulatory and legal

The FDA. The FDA's June 2021 advisory against poppers names the company's brands among others: “Brand names include Jungle Juice, Extreme Formula, HardWare, Quick Silver, Super RUSH, Super RUSH Nail Polish Remover and Premium Ironhorse, among others”.[30] Its consumer update of July 2021 says poppers are “labeled with names like rush super rush jungle juice locker room sub zero iron horse”.[31] Neither names the company or distinguishes Pac-West's bottles from AFAB's or from counterfeits; Super RUSH Nail Polish Remover is AFAB's wording, not Pac-West's.[13]

March 2025. The FDA searched a rival bottler, Double Scorpio, in Austin that month (see the poppers deep dive). The Advocate reported on March 14 that Pac-West “has also wiped its website replacing it with a graphic showing the” company's logo.[32] A week later the Los Angeles Times reported that “major players including Pac West Distributing and Nitro Solv had taken down their websites or replaced them with banners saying they no longer operate”.[33] The archive agrees: the full home page was captured on 2025-02-06, and from 2025-03-18 the page is a PWD logo and nothing else, through the latest capture in February 2026.[13][34][35] The company's lawyer withdrew from its trademark files in the same month.[4] No warning letter, indictment or consent decree naming Pac-West was found in the dockets or FDA pages read.[36]

Figure 14. February 2025, the last full capture. New caps and labels, still a solvent cleaner, with a warning that it may be fatal if swallowed. [13]

Figure 15. March 18, 2025, five days after the FDA's search at a rival bottler. The site is a logo and nothing else. [34]

The marks move to Buffalo. By 2026-04-15 the USPTO's records showed a change of ownership on the live registrations. The 1979 Rush registration now names “pwd international inc owner address 912 elmwood ave buffalo new york”, with the entry “apr 15 2026 automatic update of assignment of ownership”.[10] The same change appears on Rush Original, Iron Horse, Locker Room, Super Rush, Never Fake It and the 2023 Gold Rush registration.[19][16][37] New York's corporation records show PWD International Inc. filed as a domestic business corporation in Erie County on 2026-01-01, with its process address at 912 Elmwood Ave, Buffalo.[38] PWD Distributing LLC was filed at the same address on 2026-03-11 and TPK Global Brands LLC on 2026-03-18; Sub-Zero Distributing LLC, filed in 2020, gives it too. A barber shop and an architecture practice give the same address, so it reads as a shared filing address, and the records do not say who owns any of them.[38] NBC News reported in 2025 that a poppers retailer, The Popper King, “which is based in buffalo new york”, had not been contacted by the FDA.[39] The assignment of the marks, and the documents that tie that retailer to the buyer's address, are set out in the Popper King dossier.

The expired marks were left to lapse. Gold Rush (2016), the incense registrations and the Rush personal lubricant registration were cancelled for want of a maintenance filing between 2022 and 2024, and Quick Silver, Ram and Hardware expired in 2023.[4][18][17]

Canada. The brand reached Canada before Pac-West owned it. Health Canada's 2013 advisory on bottles labelled as leather cleaner or incense found Rush among them, and named the distributor: “lockerroom marketing ltd 694 derwent way delta b c has been distributing” Rochefort, Rush and Amsterdam Special.[40] That was a Canadian company, not Pac-West, and three years later Pac-West's site disowned Amsterdam bottles bearing its marks.[7]

Still open

• Nevada's record. The date Pac-West Distributing NV LLC was formed, its managers and its current standing were not read from the Nevada registry.
• How the Philadelphia cases ended. The last public ruling found is the October 2023 order on the jury.[26] The board's record shows the cancellation suspended for the civil case until February 2025 and then withdrawn.[27]
• The 2026 transfer. The assignment itself (its date, parties and price) is read in the Popper King dossier. Who owns PWD International Inc. is not in the New York record.
• What is in the bottles. No analysis of a Pac-West bottle has been published.

If you have bought a bottle with Pac-West's name on the label, rate it below or comment on the thread at the foot of this page.

Changes

• 2026-10-11: first published.
• 2026-10-12: linked to the Lockerroom Marketing dossier; Health Canada named it a distributor of Rush in 2013.[40]
• 2026-10-12: the 2026 change of ownership restated as shown by 2026-04-15, and linked to the Popper King dossier, which reads the assignment.[10]
• 2026-10-12: linked to the AFAB dossier; both sell Rush-family bottles, AFAB under the 2016 settlement.[9]

References

1. neverfakeit.com home page, archived 2014-10-09 — Wayback Machine
2. Sex, Drugs, Innovation, Law: Regulating the Legality of 'Poppers' — Lawrence Myung and William P. Kasper, California Law Review vol. 112, August 2024
3. Great Lakes Products Inc. Pays To Settle Civil Penalty Case (release 94-136) — US Consumer Product Safety Commission, 1994-09-22
4. USPTO TSDR status: GOLD RUSH, registration 4925373 (2016, cancelled), read 2026-10-11 — US Patent and Trademark Office
5. This Man Does Not Make Poppers — David Mack, BuzzFeed News, 2021-07-27
6. neverfakeit.com home page, archived 2019-04-19 — Wayback Machine
7. neverfakeit.com home page, archived 2016-10-03 — Wayback Machine
8. Farr v. Pac-West Distributing NV LLC, E.D. Pa. No. 2:16-cv-00175, docket (RECAP) — Free Law Project RECAP, mirrored by the Internet Archive
9. Pac-West Distributing NV LLC v. AFAB Industrial Services, Inc., No. 19-3584, memorandum (Doc. 40, 2020-08-04) — US District Court, Eastern District of Pennsylvania
10. USPTO TSDR status: RUSH, registration 1112095 (filed 1976, registered 1979), read 2026-10-11 — US Patent and Trademark Office
11. neverfakeit.com home page, archived 2020-11-01 — Wayback Machine
12. neverfakeit.com image pwd30s500rev2016.jpg, the 30 ml line, archived 2016-10-22 — Wayback Machine
13. neverfakeit.com home page, archived 2025-02-06 — Wayback Machine
14. Can someone tell me the difference between these different Rush poppers? (2021-09-07) — r/askgaybros — anecdotal report, not evidence
15. 15 U.S. Code § 2057a. Banning of butyl nitrite — Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School
16. USPTO TSDR status: IRON HORSE, registration 4438442 (2013), read 2026-10-11 — US Patent and Trademark Office
17. USPTO TSDR status: RUSH, registration 4541507 (2014, cancelled), read 2026-10-11 — US Patent and Trademark Office
18. USPTO TSDR status: RUSH, registration 5217553 (incense, 2017, cancelled), read 2026-10-11 — US Patent and Trademark Office
19. USPTO TSDR status: RUSH ORIGINAL, registration 5084851 (2016), read 2026-10-11 — US Patent and Trademark Office
20. USPTO TSDR status: BOLT, application 86758546 (abandoned 2016), read 2026-10-11 — US Patent and Trademark Office
21. USPTO TSDR status: GOLD RUSH, application 86758700 (abandoned 2016), read 2026-10-11 — US Patent and Trademark Office
22. Pac-West Distributing NV LLC v. AFAB Industrial Services, Inc., E.D. Pa. No. 2:19-cv-03584, docket (RECAP) — Free Law Project RECAP, mirrored by the Internet Archive
23. Pac-West v. AFAB, No. 19-3584, memorandum denying AFAB's second motion to dismiss (Doc. 59, 2021-07-27), scanned — US District Court, E.D. Pa., via GovInfo
24. Pac-West v. AFAB, No. 19-3584, memorandum on reconsideration (Doc. 95, 2022-03-30) — US District Court, Eastern District of Pennsylvania
25. Pac-West v. AFAB, No. 19-3584, memorandum on Pac-West's motion for partial summary judgment on AFAB's counterclaims (Doc. 155, 2023-05-22), scanned — US District Court, Eastern District of Pennsylvania
26. AFAB v. Pac-West, No. 19-566, and Pac-West v. AFAB, No. 19-3584, memorandum on the jury demand (2023-10-23), scanned — US District Court, Eastern District of Pennsylvania
27. TTABVUE, Cancellation No. 92082914, AFAB Industrial Services, Inc. v. Pac-West Distributing NV LLC (filed 2023-07-28, terminated 2025-03-06) — USPTO Trademark Trial and Appeal Board
28. What online vendor do you trust to sell authentic PWD poppers? (2015-07-14) — r/askgaybros — anecdotal report, not evidence
29. Out of the Blue: Methemoglobinemia Associated With the Use of Amyl Nitrite in Rush Poppers for Erectile Stimulation — Cureus, 2023 (PMC10387288)
30. FDA Advises Consumers Not to Purchase or Use Nitrite "Poppers" — US Food and Drug Administration, 2021-06-24
31. Ingesting or Inhaling Nitrite "Poppers" Can Cause Severe Injury or Death — US Food and Drug Administration, consumer update, 2021-07-15
32. Trump is coming for your poppers: major producer closes amid FDA crackdown — Mey Rude, The Advocate, 2025-03-14
33. FDA crackdown on poppers prompts rush on popular gay party drug — Sonja Sharp, Los Angeles Times, syndicated by Yahoo News, 2025-03-21
34. neverfakeit.com home page, archived 2025-03-18 (a logo only) — Wayback Machine
35. Wayback Machine capture index for neverfakeit.com — Internet Archive
36. Federal dockets naming Pac-West Distributing in the RECAP archive, searched through the Internet Archive's usfederalcourts collection, 2026-10-11 — Internet Archive
37. USPTO TSDR status: GOLD RUSH, registration 7068629 (2023), read 2026-10-11 — US Patent and Trademark Office
38. New York Department of State, active corporations with process address 912 Elmwood Ave, Buffalo, read 2026-10-11 — New York State, data.ny.gov
39. FDA reportedly raids manufacturer of poppers, an increasingly popular party drug — NBC News, 2025-03-14
40. Marketed leather cleaners and liquid incense are being used to get high, poses serious dangers to Canadians (RA-29269) — Health Canada, 2013-05-16 (archived advisory)