Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin R. Steele and local law enforcement officials today outlined recent investigations of smoke shops in three counties found in the Montgomery County Investigative Grand Jury’s Report titled “Unregulated, Unsafe and Illegal — The Reality of Smoke Shops in Pennsylvania.”
DA Steele said the report addresses “the pressing public safety issues presented by the unregulated smoke shops, which have proliferated throughout Pennsylvania since the passage of the federal 2018 Farm Bill and calls for regulation and multiple changes to the oversight of smoke shops in order to protect the public, especially children.”
A 23-person Grand Jury was presented with evidence and testimony from physicians, psychiatrists and toxicologists, smoke shop owners and employees, numerous narcotics enforcement officers from Montgomery, Bucks and Chester Counties, and a school safety coordinator between January 29 to October 29. The evidence “exposed a public health crisis that is unfolding in plain sight across Pennsylvania,” Steele wrote. “Retailers—smoke shops, gas stations and convenience stores—have little to no oversight and are openly selling actual marijuana and illegal THC products.”
Testimony by narcotics enforcement detectives described their undercover smoke shop purchases of multiple types of products from numerous stores. Testing on 144 of those products was done by National Medical Services and the Pennsylvania State Police Lab and found that 93.75% of the products (135 products) were “full-blown marijuana with THC levels of 5.0% and higher.” The legal limit is 0.3%.
The investigation “revealed a widespread awareness among everyone involved in the supply chain, from store owners and their employees to the distributors themselves, that they are selling marijuana—a substance that remains illegal in Pennsylvania,” the report said.
“The numerous witnesses who testified before the Grand Jury provided a comprehensive and troubling picture of a health crisis, due to the unregulated nature of these products and the smoke shops, gas stations and other retail outlets who sell them in ways that skirt or outright violate current laws,” said DA Steele. “This Wild West situation exists due to the lack of needed laws and oversight that puts not only adults but children in jeopardy from unregulated products, little oversight of retailers and their operations, unsafe products and illegal operations. This is a community and public health emergency, and the Pennsylvania legislature needs to take swift and decisive action to regulate this industry, much like the Commonwealth regulates tobacco and alcohol products, in order to protect public health.”
The report also “outlined needed reforms that ranged from licensing smoke shops to establishing a minimum age for purchase to establishing testing requirements for the products themselves. The eight overarching recommendations can be found on the Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office website and in the report below:
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