SHOPS ARE COMING DOWN OFF PARAPHERNALIA SALES

It's End-Of-The-Era Time For Local Head Shops, Kc Police Say.

Gone are those heady days when ballyhooing bongs, retailing roach clips and
hustling hemp were commonplace, says Kansas City police Detective Maggie
McGuire.

"The feds are behind us now on all this," McGuire says. "Up until March if
you'd gone into 7th Heaven or Zowie! you would have seen bongs in the shape
of guns that you put the barrel into your mouth to smoke out of it, all
kinds of strange things."

Quoth the police, nevermore.

"Zowie! and all the other businesses that are distributing drug
paraphernalia (were) issued a notice that they had 30 days to get rid of
all their drug paraphernalia," McGuire says. "Otherwise they were in
violation of federal law, and a search warrant would be served upon their
business."

There's nothing particularly dramatic about the timing, says Drug
Enforcement Administration spokeswoman Shirley Armstead of St. Louis.

"Parents and community coalitions are the people who are pushing these
issues," Armstead says. "They're calling the local police and complaining
about these shops that are selling drug paraphernalia."

The push here started earlier this year, McGuire says.

Since then, Zowie! has closed, 7th Heaven has dialed back its smoking
section, What? on 39th Street did away with its profitable pipes biz, and
Coopers at 36th and Broadway posted a list on its door of the "smoking
accessories" it no longer sells.

Says What? manager Ashley Fletcher: "The only thing keeping us going now is
the tattoos and the piercing. The shop's dead. Retail is dead. Pipes were
80 percent of our business. We can't even sell hemp lotion. Like people are
going to put it in a bowl and smoke it. And we can't sell hemp papers."

"Regular rolling papers are fine," McGuire says. "The only rolling papers
we made people take off the shelf were the ones with the word 'hemp' in them."

Seems 7th Heaven didn't get the memo. As of Tuesday it was still selling
papers with names like Jamaican Hemp and Bob Marley Hemp, along with a
selection of what appeared to be small ceramic pipes. Ostensibly for use
with tobacco products.

Which speaks to the legal issues at hand.

"The general issue in these cases is whether the products (sold) are likely
to be used for controlled substances," says criminal attorney J.R. Hobbs,
who will represent 7th Heaven owner Jan Fichman in his trial next January.
Fichman and his wife, Anita, were indicted earlier this year by a federal
grand jury for allegedly selling $3.1 million of illegal drug paraphernalia.