A passerby pauses to examine a large hookah displayed outside the Stop & Save Smoke Shop on East Main Street. (Photo by Carl E. Hartdegen)
WESTFIELD – The wares offered at the city’s newest tobacconist will have to change soon after police officers visited the store and informed the owner that many of the items displayed for sale violate a state law prohibiting the sale of drug paraphernalia.
Det. Sgt. Stephen K. Dickinson said Friday that he and Sgt. Eric Hall, the commander of the department’s community policing unit, visited the Stop & Save Smoke Shop in the East Main Street shopping strip on Friday to advise the owner that he may not offer for sale items usually used to smoke marijuana and other contraband.
The store, which opened a few months ago, devotes about half of its prominent display space to water pipes, “bongs” and glass smoking pipes ranging from utilitarian to elaborate.
A sign on the door asks persons entering to produce proof of age, as minors are not permitted entry and identification, even of obvious adults, is checked.
The display cases are marked with small notices indicated that the items are intended to be used to smoke tobacco products but Dickinson said he told the owner “Nobody smokes tobacco from those pipes.”
Also displayed in the store are conventional briar pipes, pipe tobacco, cigars, cigarettes and electronic ‘cigarettes’.
Dickinson said that the storeowner protested saying that he might not be able to sustain his business without selling the prohibited items that he said have been popular with his customers.
Dickinson said he told the man that the his success selling the paraphernalia items is probably due to the fact that they are not readily available elsewhere in the city because police have already visited the established stores which might stock those items and required those owners to remove the contraband from their shelves.
Dickinson said he told the owner that the items must be removed from the shelves within a week and a half.
He said that the sale of items used to “introduce into the human body a controlled substance” is prohibited by Chapter 94C, Section 321, of the Massachusetts General Laws. The law provides as punishment, upon conviction, imprisonment for at least one year and no more than two years or by a fine of not less than $500 or more than $5,000 or by both penalties.
