PROMOTING DRUGS OR JUST FREE SPEECH?

GILLETTE (AP) -- Just off the Douglas Highway, a blanket with what appears
to be a marijuana leaf is hung up for sale.

Blocks away, a store that once sold elaborate, brightly colored pipes has
been shut down.

Across town, novelty stores sell hats, mugs, T-shirts and other merchandise
that appear to advertise marijuana.

Sellers of such items say their products are only what customers make of
them, but others say the drug-associated knickknacks perpetuate substance
abuse in a city that's already facing a methamphetamine crisis.

Victoria Moren, owner of M+M Imports, is used to taking flak for the
blankets she sells outside her stores. Designs such as a Confederate flag
or a Corona bottle often attract attention, but it's the one that resembles
a marijuana leaf that draws the most fire.

A police officer stopped by and asked her to stop displaying it outside her
store since it promoted drugs, although he told her it was not against the
law to do so.

Moren rejects the accusation that she is promoting marijuana. She calls the
design a slightly altered version of the Canadian maple leaf and said the
company who sells it calls it "The New Canadian Flag."

"I felt offended by (the officers request). It's just a blanket," she said.
"It's not like you can do anything with the blankets."

Sellers sometimes face more than just bad feelings.

On July 28, Jeffrey Doles took more than $7,000 that he saved while in
prison and started The Hip Hop Hippie, a store that sold pipes and other
smoking products that police said were made for marijuana.

Officers shut the store down Aug. 10 and seized nearly all the stores
products. Doles was arrested two days later when he reopened the store with
the same types of products that police originally confiscated.

Doles, however, says you can't call something a marijuana pipe unless
there's marijuana in it. To emphasize that his products aren't intended for
drug use, he hung up brightly colored signs telling customers that the
store doesn't sell drug paraphernalia.

"We do not sell drug paraphernalia!!!," the signs read. "All of our
accessories are intended for use with legal substances only. Any discussion
regarding the illegal use of these products will result in you being asked
to leave! Thank you!!!"

Added Doles: "No one has ever called these pipes narcotics pipes. (Police)
are the only ones who have criminalized these pipes. I don't care what you
smoke in it. I'm selling smoking accessories."

Sheriffs Sgt. Steve Hamilton said it's disingenuous to claim that such
merchandise wasn't intended for drugs. He thinks it's ironic that people
would endorse items with few legal uses at a time when there's a move
toward more control over legitimate products like pseudoephedrine, a meth
precursor drug used in some cold medicines that many states regulate.

"It's an insult to the intelligence of the average person," Hamilton said.

Doles disagreed. To make his case, he talks about a color-changing pipe
that he bought from a company whose catalogs proclaim "All of your tobacco
needs."

"It's exactly like your grandpa's tobacco pipe, only a 2005 version of it,"
Doles said.

But his neighbors aren't buying it.

Teresa Lish owns Year Round Brown, a tanning salon one store over from the
Hip Hop Hippie. While Lish acknowledges that some of Doles customers
probably did use his products for tobacco, she said the store attracted
many more questionable clients. Their appearance was such, she said, that
she had dead bolts put on the store's back door.

"If you're selling bongs and stuff like that, you're going to get people
who use marijuana," she said.

Many people object to the location, as well. Ginger Uran is the owner of
Tinker Tots, a child-care center for infants to 5-year-olds that sits just
in front of Dole's store.

Lish said parents were concerned when they learned The Hip Hop Hippie had
opened. Loud music and cars from the store's customers didn't do anything
to ease their fears.

"When they were shut down, we were happy," she said.

Moren, though, said her blankets are different. They are harmless and don't
have any such illegal uses, she said. Her clients are also diverse. Often
she has well-dressed customers buy one of the leaf blankets.

Hamilton is quick to say he supports the free speech behind the products.

"There is certainly no problem as an example to all of us of the free
speech portion of the Constitution," he said. "While this is not a
statement I would like to make, I would support free speech."

However, he said the blankets were harmful in their own way:
Marijuana-emblazened merchandise promotes a criminal act, and a medically
risky one as well, in addition to reflecting on the person using the product.

"Too many people don't understand that these statements are a measure of
the person making the statement," he said.

Moren concedes that she's sometimes uncomfortable selling the blankets.
Once a teenager bought a couple of blankets and sold them to his friends
for a profit and then came back to buy more. And her 10-year-old and
4-year-old children have asked about them, prompting her to watch more
closely whom she sells them to.

"I gotta pay the bills," she said. "It's not like I'm selling alcohol that
kills people."

The products have been lucrative. Moren sold out her first shipment of
blankets in less than a week. She raised the price from $50 to $60, but
still had trouble keeping them in stock.

Entry after entry in her store's record book reads "Cannabis -- $60," with
only a handful of other designs penned in between. Moren's sold so many
that she no longer has one to display outside her store.

"I made $7,000 in less than a week on one blanket. That's all I'm selling,"
she said. "Once I got this in, they aren't buying my NASCAR (blankets)."