AUTHORITIES SMOKE OUT WATER BONGS

Have you ever looked at California's bong law? Have you ever really
looked at it?

Selling glass pipes and water bongs is perfectly legal in the state,
so long as their intended use is for smoking tobacco and not pot.
That difference in intent may seem like a fine line, but it can mean
the difference between making a buck and being totally screwed. Just
ask the owners of the seven East County smoke shops whose businesses
were raided last week by police and sheriff's deputies.

Acting at the behest of San Diego County District Attorney Bonnie
Dumanis, authorities on Jan. 21 served search warrants at shops in El
Cajon, La Mesa and Santee. They seized an estimated 15,000 glass
pipes, bongs and other items as part of an investigation into whether
the owners violated the state's drug-paraphernalia laws.

None of the owners could be reached for comment by deadline, but an
employee at one of the shops raided in El Cajon says authorities have
it all wrong.

The DA's office "sent us a letter saying water pipes were illegal and
that we needed to take them down, but they're not illegal," she says,
declining to give her name. "We called the DA's office about that,
but they never called us back. Then police came in and said, 'You
didn't take the water pipes down, so we're seizing them.' We lost
about $50,000 in merchandise."

Asked to comment on the employee's claim that the seized items were
legal under state law, El Cajon Police Lt. Steve Shakowski cited
California Health and Safety Code 11364.7, which states that selling
paraphernalia for the purpose of ingesting illegal drugs is a
misdemeanor. As to how authorities knew the items were going to be
used to ingest illegal drugs and not tobacco, Shakowski was blunt:

"I've been a cop for 25 years and worked narcotics for 11 of those
years," he says. "During that time, I have not encountered anyone who
smoked tobacco out of a water bong. I'm not saying there aren't
people who do-I've just never encountered them. We're making a
distinction between hookah pipes and water bongs. Hookahs are from an
older tradition-they look different and typically were used for
smoking tobacco. The water pipes we seized-and we didn't seize any
hookah pipes-are generally not used for legitimate purposes."

Common knowledge aside, says DA spokesman Paul Levikow, authorities
knew the intended use of the items because they knew it.

"Our undercover agents went into the shops making it clear what they
wanted to use the bongs for," he says, adding that the agents visited
all seven of the shops prior to the raids. "The clerks knew what the
buyer was buying the bongs for."

Regardless of the intended use of the paraphernalia, Bruce Mirken,
director of communications for the pro-legalization Marijuana Policy
Project in San Francisco, says the real issue is whether the raids
were a good use of law-enforcement time and resources.

"You're dealing with a jurisdiction"-San Diego County-"that's
intensely hostile to marijuana," Mirken says. "There's not the
slightest evidence that paraphernalia laws have any impact on
marijuana use. Even if these people have technically broken the law,
this is law-enforcement activity that accomplishes precisely nothing."