Anytime I’ve ever been in a head shop (I don’t know if that is a colloquilism; I’m referring to a smoke shop that sells glass pipes often used for smoking marijuana), there is some version of a homemade sign informing people that the products are for legal tobacco smoking only, and that references to drug use will not be tolerated.
I’m guessing there are often undercover stings trying to bust these types of stores for illegal activity, so I understand the desire to not appear complicit in law breaking.
However, in an effort to comply with this mantra, a customer has to watch their words. You can ask for a “water pipe”, for example, but you can’t ask for a “bong.” The last store I went to (they sell humorous t-shirts and bumper stickers, too, so I am not endorsing illegal behavior with this admission) had a sign expressly forbidding the word “bong”.
Why is this? Is there some legal reason that Bong is a bad word; is it so closely associated with drug use that nobody could possibly buy a bong to smoke flavored tobacco?
What if a smoke shop wasn’t so constrained? Could I open a shop that positively endorses smoking weed (as many of the t-shirts and signs for sale do), with the caveat that I do not have marijuana, do not sell marijuana, and have no idea where to obtain marijuana?
The laws they are trying to skirt are those banning the sale of “drug paraphrenalia.” I would strongly imagine that some series of court rulings in various jurisdictions established that while it was just barely plausible that a funny looking water pipe would be used as a quasi-hookah for tobacco, no reasonable person would believe that something billed as a “bong” was for anything other than intended (and mutually contemplated, as between buyer and seller) use with dope, so strongly is the word associated with marijuana, not tobacco, in a way that “water pipe” is not (largely, I’d guess, due to the fact that hookahs did exist for tobacco).
I’m not sure about in America where you seem to have all manner of tight rules about stuff “crossing state lines”, but here, it is the opposite. Back around 1980 or so, bong shops started to flourish. There was one, as I recalled it, subtly named THE SYDNEY BONG SHOP. Then the state government outlawed the sale of bongs. So everybody just started picking them up on interstate trips, or even easier, getting them mail order from interstate (see, we have free trade between states firmly entrenched in our constitution). The same applies for X-rated videos and also fireworks (though you can’t mail order the latter for obvious reasons).
Anyway, you can buy waterpipes here again now. The Middle Eastern shops sell them. Some of them look suspiciously like… naaah, can’t be.
But they couldn’t outlaw plastic OJ bottles and bits of garden hose.
Because the lawmakers are trying to do something the law is unable to do: Prevent anything related to marijuana from being sold without seriously pissing off the people who smoke tobacco and other legal plants. This has led to what you see in this thread, which is one magical word being taboo and another magical word being substituted in its place. As a result, not a single bong is sold but many, many water pipes legally change hands daily.
This is 100% true if but only if you are saying that because you believe dope should be legal (or you just don’t care).
If you accept that proscribing sale/use of dope is a legitimate option for government to take, in some circumstances – then paraphrenalia bans are somewhere on the spectrum of stupid to not terribly stupid.
If water pipes or other paraphrenalia were totally unavailable, this can reasonably be speculated to dent the demand for (or the fun had) in smoking dope, thus partly effectuating the ban on dope itself. It’s one of those making-it-more-of-a-hassle laws (which sometimes do work). It’s also a “we’re going to go after everything associated with dope” message. I would strongly imagine that the reason there is a loophole for “water pipes” is not because legislatures drafted it that way to avoid offending tobacco smokers (I mean come on – how many people use those contraptions for tobacco, IRL?). I am pretty sure they started out as blanket bans on all such pipes, and some enterprising defense lawyer(s) convinced a few judges or juries that there was a reasonable doubt as to whether the State had proven beyond a reasonable doubt that defendant was lying when he said his Marlboros tasted smoother filtered through water.
So, there’s a detente, and the police probably kind of fume when they have to let those places stay open. Mind you, IIRC, bongs are not legal to sell and produce under all circumstances – if they can prove that the “water pipe” you bought (perfectly legally) in the Haight has dope residue in it when they pull you over for erratic driving and find it in your car, they can (again, IIRC) bust you for both possession and paraphrenalia.
How far to go with “legal thing usable for illegal purposes” laws is tricky. You can ban lockpicks. How about key blanks or other tools that could be used for illegal entry? I’m not about to ban baking soda just because it can be used to make crack. Bongs? I’d ban them if I were king and decided not to legalize dope. YMMV as to how incrementally effective this would be in reducing dope usage.
I think they’re silly laws regardless of dope’s legal status. A lot of people in my city do smoke that Middle Eastern strong, flavoured tobacco in water pipes. Are we going to waste government, police, and court resources fiddling over what constitutes a marijuana pipe and a tobacco one, when the kids will just make a juice bottle bong or roll a joint anyway?
A similar example would be homebrew’s illegality in Australia until the early 1970s. You could only make low alcohol beer. One company put out a kit for low alcohol beer, and it huge red lettering it said: “Add 250g sugar. WARNING DO NOT ADD MORE SUGAR AS THIS WILL INCREASE THE ALCOHOL CONTENT ABOVE THE LEGAL LIMIT”. Uh huh. The government repealed the law virtually overnight.
Reminds me of one of the funniest sights I’ve ever seen. Years and years ago in a small city in West Texas, a popular head shop had a regular filter-tipped cigarette sticking out of the bowl of each and every bong, to show that’s what it was used for.
I saw AKA Tommy Chong at the Palm Springs Film Festival a few years ago, with Tommy sitting down the row from us. It’s well worth seeing if you want to get glimpse as to why calling something a “bong” is a bad idea.
I had a friend in college who told me he knew a guy that smoked that cigarette with a newly acquired bong. All his smoke-mates, there for a different type of smoke, where aghast at the harshness, and it made him sick. These things are gross for regual tobacco (although hookah bars are perfectly legal, and the one I went to, which also served amazing food, was aweome; one of my college roommates had a hookah, and we smoked this flavored, sort of wet, tobacco, which was quite smooth).
I’ve seen similiar language restrictions on asking for “whip cream chargers”, or “nitrous chargers” in lieu of “whippets.” One store required you to sign a statement that you promised you’d only use nitrous as it’s “lawfully” intended (the boxes warn you not to inhale it: “Do not inhale! Misuse can be physically harmful and dangerous to your health.”).
There’s a store 'round here that sells those too. Ask for whippets and they don’t have them. If you inquire about ballons, you’ll be asked to leave the store (they’ll even go so far as to put the product back on the shelf and refuse to sell it to you).
Again, way back in West Texas, I knew a blind man from Dallas who, back in Dallas, had actually run his own catering business. He was a pretty fair cook and had used those chargers for whipped cream but also inhaled them to get high. He was a pretty funny old guy. I had his number, but he said people always readily bought his innocent act because he was blind. He told a hilarious story of ordering a bunch of those chargers from some redneck lady who told him confidentially: “Did you know that some people use these to get higgghhhh?” in a godawful Texas twang. “No, you don’t say.”
It’s not some fetish over “crossing state lines.” It’s that, very generally speaking, state law governs things that happen within states and federal law governs things that happen between states. Thus, in many cases, the federal government has jurisdiction only when something crosses state lines. Whatever’s going on might still be illegal; it’s just a question of which court (state or federal) you’re going to be hauled into.
So do we. It means that one state can’t impose import duties upon goods coming from another state or otherwise encumber the trade of goods solely based upon the state of origin. It doesn’t mean that nothing can be illegal.
A popular chain of porn/head shops around here give you a little baggie of tobacco stapled to a card that explains that the pipe you just bought is for tobacco use only.
My buddy works at one, he makes dozens of these a night.
We used to call them “hippie crack”, because you’d find all of these empty nitrous cannisters laying on the streets after a weekend in college. People would do a whole box.
At the store where you had to sign the “legal use only” waiver, I had a friend who would sign with distinguished psuedonyms like Mickey Mouse.
Impossible to be totally unavailable. You can make one from junk in your kitchen. But making something that is already popular hard to come by may increase the demand, and the increased demand may make the price go up, and then they become very available, which produces the opposite effect from desired.
