CITY FIGHTS PLANS FOR STORE RUN BY MARIJUANA LEGALIZERS

There was no post-holiday shopping rush Monday at a store set up by a group
promoting the legalization of marijuana. The city has blocked its opening
indefinitely. "It's not the image we are trying to project in the historic
downtown district," Mayor Paul Jones said Monday. He has been trying to
spruce up the city's 19th century storefronts.

The city of 12,000 residents, known for its annual hot-air balloon
festival, is the Portage County seat, east of Akron.

The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws has set up shop
next door to the Ravenna Area Chamber of Commerce but has been unable to
obtain a required occupancy permit.

The store plans to sell T-shirts, jewelry and clothing made from hemp. A
fiber-producing crop related to marijuana, hemp does not produce a high,
but growing it is generally illegal in the United States.

NORML, which promotes medicinal uses of marijuana, said it was trying to
work through city channels and blamed the permit problem on the politics of
marijuana legalization.

"We're trying to work within the system and do everything legal," group
spokesman John Hartman said Monday. The group has a store in Lakewood, near
Cleveland, and closed a Dayton store early in 1999 because of staffing
problems.

No drug-related paraphernalia would be sold at the Ravenna store, which has
been ready to open for two months, Hartman said.

Jones said the store must meet all regulatory requirements before opening.
He said he would block the opening, if necessary, through zoning rules.

Hartman said court action was a possibility.

NORML's store passed a fire inspection, but the mayor has tabled the
group's storefront sign proposal and the issue is pending before the city
planning commission.

Eleanor Ahrens, 45, of Shalersville, the shop's manager, pleaded no contest
in 1996 to trafficking in marijuana. She began growing marijuana when her
doctor recommended it as an alternative to prescriptions for epilepsy, an
anxiety disorder and seizures.

Ahrens mixed marijuana into tea and food to ease her symptoms and restore
her appetite. She says she no longer does so, but hopes such use someday
will be legal for people like herself and those with AIDS, cancer, muscular
dystrophy, glaucoma and other diseases.

"Our motivation to have the marijuana was to make it better for her," Ted
Ahrens, Eleanor's husband, told the Kent-Ravenna Record-Courier.

The mayor said Ahrens' conviction was a factor in his thinking. "I can't
understand why a group like this would want to come into a conservative
small town and upset everyone," he said.