Why Head Shop Raids Are Unfair and Unjust

Duval Street is the epicenter of Key West, Fla., home to Sloppy Joe's, Ernest Hemingway's and a host of bars and hotels that have for a century captured the spark and soul of this land of the lost.

The Environmental Circus is gone, Valladares' News Stand is history, and though La Te Da still stands, Larry Formica and his pink Cadillac have long since passed. Where a beat up wooden dock and a collage of cultures once gathered on historic Mallory Square, cruise ships now pour out thousands of tourists in flowered shirts onto the city's main streets.

Fantasy Fest still wreaks havoc to the city every fall, but the pirate image of this out-of-the-way city has been lost for a long time now, to T-shirt shops and condos; to name hotels and tourist traps. The epicenter of the city, Duval Street, has seen some of its landmarks become chain pharmacies, and cheap coffee shops like Shorty's and Dennis Pharmacy have become convenience stores.

Walking down Duval Street in 2008, you are more likely to find a foreign exchange student from Slovakia peddling a bike for extra cash than you are to stumble upon a runaway teen from New York hustling a street corner for change. The times they are no longer a-changing. The times they have changed.

The temperature on Oct. 17, 2008 in Key West was its typical tropical 75 degrees. Ladies were sunning themselves bare-breasted at the Pier House's private beach. Fishermen were working the pier, vacationers on mopeds crisscrossed the narrow streets and more than one drunk stumbled down an alleyway. After all, it is still Key West.

But the heat on Duval Street was about to get hotter.

The shops on Duval Street opened their doors as usual, with no threats of a hurricane brewing. Merchants, if anything, were readying themselves for the annual, sin-filled festival of self-ordained decadence, Key West Fantasy Fest. On that date, many of them, head shops, were selling rolling papers, glass pipes, bongs and other products designed to enhance the right of happiness, a constitutional right not too often protected by our courts.

The stores had signs all over them saying the products are for 'legal and tobacco use only.' But this distressed the new mayor, concerned that his little town was sending the wrong message: "You know that you don't really smoke tobacco out of those things." He sounded like Sarah Palin telling us how you could see Russia "from my house here in Alaska."

The misguided mayor of this island city disapproved of the displays and set to do something about it. So he called the feds. You see, under broad Florida laws, those pipes are legal. Not so under federal law. Understandably, this confuses the average citizen. Heck, it confuses lawyers, too.

Title 21, Chapter 13 of federal law states: "Drug paraphernalia means any equipment, product or material of any kind which is primarily intended or designed for use in manufacturing, compounding, converting, concealing, producing, processing, preparing, injecting, ingesting, inhaling or otherwise introducing into the human body a controlled substance ..."

Supported by the local district attorney, the mayor found his answer. On this quiet morning in October, federal authorities from 16 agencies, aided by local and state operatives, converged on Duval Street and the neighboring streets where head shops dispensed their products lawfully, or so they thought.

Store by store, law enforcement entered with badges and guns, uniforms and crates -- that's right, crates -- to confiscate and cart away the inventory of these stores to the waiting rental truck conspicuously parked in the center of the street.

Systematically, the feds sucked up any items they deemed as contraband that they say could be used to violate Title 21. The items taken were rolling papers, lighters, ashtrays, bongs, catalogues, pipes and anything they say could potentially be used to violate the law. There was no order or determination of probable cause by a jurist, no ruling by a court that the items were illegal, just law enforcement officers with cartons and guns.