Weeded Out

To be blunt: anyone who plans on engaging in psychedelic activities at 4:20 p.m. in Boston is recommended to seek out another city to buy that perfect piece.

When compared to other cities, Boston only has a sparse amount of stores that sell water pipes and ‘functional’ glassware. Places such as New York City and Los Angeles have more than 100 shops of this nature.

But Boston is a lot less accommodating to its Dead Head population as legal restrictions prevent storeowners from selling equipment that they know will be used for controlled purposes. A search for “head shop” near Boston on Yelp only garners seven results – and the police have already shut some of them down.

HEMPERED BY POLICE

There are only a few stores in Boston that include “spiritual glassware” in their inventory, including The Hempest, Ritual Arts and Sugar Daddy’s Smoke Shop.

Last year, three shops in Allston were shut down in a police raid on head shops, including the Wildside Gallery, The Joint and the Green Side Up Gallery.

However, the Green Side Up Gallery is reopening this year after promising not to sell bongs and one-hitters for at least a year.

Shops in Boston that escaped these raids claim that they do not sell glassware exclusively.

Both stores resent the term “head shop” because their stores sell much more than glassware.

“I hate the word head shop. I’m not a head shop and I’m not selling drug paraphernalia,” said Ritual Arts owner Toni Fanning.

Twenty-eight years ago, Ritual Arts opened, but it did not sell glassware until 15 years ago, when its first stock of Native American pipes was on the shelves.

“We began to carry beautiful Native American pipes, and people came in to buy them,” Fanning said. “Eventually the artist who made them moved away, so we then sold wooden and then glass pipes made by other artists.”

“I don’t consider myself a store where people come to buy pipes,” Fanning said. “We have pipes here, but we’re more of a spiritual-oriented store.”

The Ritual Arts escaped the police raids of last year.

“There was a scare where stores were shut down – everyone was nervous, but I wasn’t a part of that,” Fanning said.

INTENT IS EVERYTHING

Even though the Ritual Arts in Allston is aimed at a spiritual clientele, the store owner admits that the other glassware shops in the neighborhood were a bit too explicit about the uses of water pipes.

“When you’re dealing with something that has a potential for illegal use, then the neighborhood becomes a Mecca for people who are not interested in collecting the glass, but for people who are not using the pipe for spiritual reasons,” Fanning said.

However, Fanning must constantly make sure that she is following state regulations for glassware even though no tobacco is sold in the store.

“I happen to collect glass and sold a lot of it, and I realized there were restrictions on tobacco. I don’t sell tobacco products – these are for legal herbs. There are other things that people smoke ceremonially for spiritual reasons,” she said. “We couldn’t sell them to anyone under 18 and we kept carding people.”

Ritual Arts enforces a strict policy on customers who talk about illegal substances when browsing water pipes. However, Fanning said does not have the ability to predict the pipes’ potential purposes.

“If they mention drugs at all when purchasing we ask them to leave,” she said. “For me, it’s a judgment call. So long as they don’t tell me that they’re using it for something illegal, I can’t assume that they are going to.”

The Hempest is another retailer that prefers to not be associated exclusively with its functional glassware.

“Only about 5 percent of the things we sell are glassware,” said store owner John Napoli. “The rest is hemp products.”
“Humans have been making hemp since they’ve been making clothing. It’s illegal to grow in the United States, but it’s legal to sell imported products,” said Napoli. “It’s the only situation in the world where you’re not allowed to grow a crop but you can sell it. The law should be change to end the prohibition on hemp farming.”

Section 32I of the statewide Controlled Substances Act prohibits the sale of drug paraphernalia when the seller knows that the equipment will be used to consume a controlled substance (hypodermic needles and syringes are the sole exception). If someone violates this law, the punishment is one to two years in prison or fine of $1,000 to $5,000.
Sellers are also not allowed to sell drug paraphernalia to people under 18.

COMMUNITY REACTION

Stores that sell glassware and other legally ambiguous goods generally avoid ire from community groups, said James Chisholm, the chief of staff for City Councilor At-Large Ayanna Pressley.

“No community group has asked us specifically about that issue. We’ve never received any knowledge targeting any sort of store that sells any sort of paraphernalia,” Chisholm said.