Somewhat scary article

[ahwahoo2006]

I found this article today:

<a href="http://www.weeklyplanet.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid:7 3642">Florida Tobacco Article</a>

Best (or worst, depending on your point of view) quote, for those too lazy to RTFA:

""One thing we did learn is the hookah trend does have a legitimate side,"

Good to know we are all being considered criminals by law enforcement...

[ahwahoo2006]

...and it doesn't like my HTML skills...

[url="http://www.weeklyplanet.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid:7%203642"]Article[/url]

[HookahDuck]

Link still doesnt work

[gunsboy]

[url="http://www.weeklyplanet.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid:73642"]http://www.weeklyplanet.com/gyrobase/Conte...t?oid=oid:73642[/url]

[ahwahoo2006]

full text:

Messing With Our Heads



A "tobacco accessories" merchant fights a proposed ordinance prohibiting the sale of drug paraphernalia.

























It's
8 p.m. on a Wednesday night, and I'm inside the Home Depot at 22nd
Street N. in St. Petersburg so Leo Calzadilla can prove a point.


He strolls through the plumbing aisle and stops at the brass
fittings. He picks up a five-inch brass nipple, screws on an elbow
tube, adds a round connector on top and holds it up to a man next to
him.


"What does this look like to you?" Calzadilla asks him.


"A pipe," the man answers uncomfortably.


Calzadilla shoots me a grin, throws the metal "pipe" into the
shopping cart and heads down to the next aisle. He spots a package of
steel wool.


"[Drug addicts] put this inside crack pipes," he says, throwing the
package into the cart and moving toward the paint aisle, where he
gathers chemicals like acetone and turpentine that can be used as
inhalants. He stops at a three-foot-long acrylic tube that could easily
be made into a bong.


"Home Depot Special -- $3.99," he says, emphasizing the price.


It goes in the cart, too.


After a trip through the garden center, Calzadilla returns to the
plumbing aisle with what he presents as a cornucopia of druggie dream
gear: pipes and tubes (which can be used, he says, for fashioning metal
pipes and homemade hookahs); sink screens (pipe bowls); and a
C02-powered contraption called Kleer Drain (a "cracker" for C02
inhalers). Depending on how they are used, the items fall within the
statutory definition of drug paraphernalia.


"Could I realistically say Home Depot is now a head shop?" he asks rhetorically.


Calzadilla is the owner of Purple Haze, a tobacco accessories
shop on 34th Street in St. Petersburg's Midtown. Recently, his store
became one of dozens in the county targeted by a proposed ordinance
prohibiting the sale of drug paraphernalia.


But Calzadilla does not sell drug paraphernalia. Well, at least he doesn't think so.


At his store -- a small space lined with glass cases filled with
pipes, rolling papers and detox kits -- Calzadilla questions the
stereotypes surrounding his inventory.


To demonstrate, he takes three different pipes out of the glass case
in front of him: a wooden pipe with a long black stem, a corn-cob pipe
and a colorful glass pipe with a cartoonish octopus on it. He holds up
each one and asks: "If you saw me smoking out of this pipe, what would
you think I was smoking?"


"It all depends on the person who interprets it," says the
44-year-old former Brooklynite who also owns a car accessories store
across the street from Purple Haze. "All these pipes are meant to smoke
tobacco -- that's what I sell them for. If a person wants to use it
improperly I cannot stop them."


His best example is the hookah, an Egyptian water pipe recently
turned mainstream. Hookah lounges where hipsters can communally smoke
flavored tobacco have popped up in urban areas across the country,
including Tampa.


He turns to his left and grabs what most college students would call a bong.


"This is the same concept, but it is called an American water pipe," he schools me.


Calzadilla goes over almost every item in the store just as
thoroughly: The scales are for jewelry, the hollow cans of Alpo dog
food are safes and the C02 cartridges are for making whipped cream to
use as a marital aid.


"If I sell it, they want to consider it illegal. But you can go to
Target, Wal-Mart, Winn Dixie and purchase it, and it's perfectly fine,"
he says. "Right there, that is unconstitutional to tell me I have to
take something off of my shelves but meanwhile let [other stores] do
it."


Pinellas County Commissioner Kenneth Welch, organizer of the
Drug Abatement Task Force that authored the proposed ordinance, thinks
that is just splitting hairs.


"You can look at the totality of that situation and say, 'Should a
reasonable retailer know these will be used for illegal purposes?'"
says Welch, who organized the task force last year in response to
pressure from the NAACP. "It paints a picture and it makes the case for
law enforcement."


Under current state statutes, retailers can only be found guilty of
selling drug paraphernalia when it has been proven they knew the items
they sold would be used to ingest drugs. The proposed ordinance
attempts to lower the standards on what a retailer should have known
certain products would be used for when selling, advertising or
manufacturing them.


The new standard question would be: When the retailer sold a
product, did they have reasonable knowledge that it would be used to
ingest illegal drugs?


"It lowers that standard for what the retailer should have known,"
Welch says. "We think we're giving [law enforcement] the tools to
prosecute against these drug paraphernalia retailers."


"It's not just the head shops," he explains. "I think we've
identified 44 locations to date and we think that's just scratching the
surface."


Many of those include convenience stores in Pinellas Park and Largo
where anybody, presumably even minors, can purchase a pipe. Some of
these retailers, like the BP gas station on 62nd Avenue in Pinellas
Park, have already taken down the offending displays.


To make the case for the insidious relationship between retailers
and drug use, Welch points to a 2005 Operation Parental Awareness and
Responsibility client study in which recovering drug addicts were asked
if the presence of smoke shops had a negative impact on their sobriety.
Fifty percent said yes.


Another survey of 89 outpatient clients of St. Pete's Westcare drug
rehab program showed more damning results: 67 percent of the
individuals report having obtained their paraphernalia from a "head" or
smoke shop.


"I literally have little old ladies asking me in the neighborhoods
... 'How can they sell that?'" he says. "The only folks I'm hearing
against this is the folks who are making a dollar on it, and frankly,
that's just not moving me."


Yet even Welch concedes some of the task force's assumptions about items associated with drug culture were wrong.


"One thing we did learn is the hookah trend does have a legitimate side," he says.


This unfamiliarity with the tobacco trade frustrates Calzadilla.


"Anything that is made by man or nature can be used improperly and
considered paraphernalia," he says. "A crack head is not going to come
into my store and spend $50-80 on a piece of glass art used to smoke
tobacco, when he can go to the local convenience store and buy a
50-cent can of soda and use that to smoke his illegal drugs."


His mantra? "It's not what you sell, it's how you sell it."


Calzadilla insists he takes the necessary precautions, including
requiring identification to enter his store, prohibiting minors and
refraining from suggestive advertising.


"If you walk into my store there's nothing here that represents any
type of illegal activity," he stresses. "I don't have shirts that say
legalize it, I don't have any lighters that have cannabis leaves on it,
I don't condone any type of illegal activity or drug use."


But what about the name of the store, sometimes used as a reference for high-grade marijuana or LSD?


Calvazilla claims he never heard the allusion.


"I like the color purple," he says with a straight face.


By the end of our paraphernalia shopping tour in Home Depot,
Calzadilla has amassed an entire cart of items that could be used
illegally, including two metal pipes he fastened together from plumbing
parts. He puts most of the items back, but decides to purchase the
pipes just to see if the cashier will sell him the items even after he
fashioned them into obvious pipes.


She does.


Calzadilla looks vindicated as he steps into the truck.


"Let me know if you want to go to Bed Bath and Beyond," he says. "They have all kinds of sh*t there.

[pauldavis]

[quote]"Let me know if you want to go to Bed Bath and Beyond," he says. "They have all kinds of sh*t there."[/quote]haha, now thats funny

[Seraph]

[quote name='ahwahoo2006']Good to know we are all being considered criminals by law enforcement...
 [/quote]Not at all. The article actually says that people will still be able to, and should be allowed to sell smoking paraphenilia as long as their intention isn't that it will be used for drugs.[quote]Under current state statutes, retailers can only be found guilty of
selling drug paraphernalia when it has been proven they knew the items
they sold would be used to ingest drugs.[/quote]The article doesn't have a lot to do with hookahs, however it shows that there is quickly becoming a thin red line between tobacco and other drugs.

[c4r80n]

it's nitrous oxide not carbon dioxide...idiotsCO2 != NO2

[thepyrofish]

"I like the color purple," he says with a straight face.HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADude, is my hero. That's funny.

[Hookahnoob]

Well.. It IS Co2. At least thats what it was origionally made for.
remember the old seltzer bottles. Like on old comedy chows or cartoons
where they would squirt water at people with? Thats where the Co2 first
came into play. THEN they made the No2 for whipcrean at home and now
people use the crackers to inhale the low grade No2

[Hookahnoob]

Can we PLEASE Get a Damm EDIT feature on here???? PLEASE???

[Sonthert]

Ya know, I used to think nitrous oxide was NO2. Then someone convinced me that is was N2O. I just looked roughly at the nomenclature rules, I think nitrous oxide is N2O. Just thought somebody might care. Guess not.

[hookah~rob~]

after reading the article the owner is sort of setting himself up for the whole community crackdown thing. i understand that what he sells is available most places, but come on, purple haze...." i like the color purple". wtf? sounds to me like some head shop owner is trying to keep his place open so that he can keep making money. anyone remember operation pipe dreams when tommy chong got nailed for possession? same places were hit and closed down. the fact that the guy is selling hookahs there futher adds to the stigma that hookahs are used for other things than shisha.

[MrGuy]

[quote name='Tangiers']Ya know, I used to think nitrous oxide was NO2. Then someone convinced me that is was N2O. I just looked roughly at the nomenclature rules, I think nitrous oxide is N2O. Just thought somebody might care. Guess not.[/quote]
yeah, it is N2O. NO2 would be nitrous dioxide, and i don't think you could have that anyways, because i THINK (dont quote me on this) nitrogen is a diatomic molecule.

[Sonthert]

Nitrogen IS diatomic in its natural state. N2 makes up two thirds (roughly) of our atmosphere, oxygen only 20.5%. NO2 does exist, I think.