The Town of Hampstead is considering adopting an ordinance that would ban the sale of synthetic marijuana products in a conscious nod to neighboring Manchester, which passed a similar ordinance in December.
Hampstead Councilman Tim Babylon broached the idea at the Feb. 11 meeting of the Hampstead Town Council in order to begin the process of writing an ordinance that could be introduced for public comment as soon as March 11.
"If you see a good idea that you see would work for your town, it's something you take a look at and try to adopt," Babylon said. "Our police chief thought it would be something we should take under advisement."
As reported in a story about Manchester's synthetic marijuana ordinance in the Dec. 4 edition of this newspaper, Linda Auerback, a Carroll County Health Department substance abuse prevention coordinator, said that synthetic marijuana consists of chemicals manufactured in clandestine labs to be structurally similar to the active ingredient in marijuana, that are then sprayed onto inert plant matter which users smoke.
The resulting "potpourri" is then packed and sold under names like "K2 Spice" or "Scooby" and labeled with warnings saying "not for human consumption," according to Auerback. The sales have technically been legal because state and federal laws enacted to ban the first of these synthetic drugs did so by enumerating each compound, allowing drug chemists to create new compounds only slightly different than the banned substances, staying one step ahead of law enforcement.
The Manchester ordinance, which passed on Dec. 11, banned synthetic marijuana compounds as a class in an attempt to prevent underground chemists from creating a work-around, and Babylon said he is looking at the Manchester ordinance as a model for Hampstead.
A nearly identical statewide ban on synthetic marijuana went into effect on Oct. 1 of last year, but Hampstead Chief of Police Ken Meekins said that the importance of adopting a homegrown ordinance is in the message it sends rather than the powers it would grant the police.
"The fact that Manchester, our nearest neighbor to the north, has enacted this ordinance after having problems with vendors selling this, it seems the prudent thing to do is enact an ordinance here so that those vendors do not relocate here," Meekins said. "My thought process there is that it is a lot easier to set the message out front than to have them relocate here and then try to legislate them out."
Messaging can be a powerful tool for a local police force, according to Manchester Chief of Police John Hess, who said sales of synthetic marijuana in Manchester had been traced to a store called Scooters and More. The passage of the state law on Oct. 1 did nothing to dissuade the operators of the store, but they quickly packed it in after Manchester passed its ordinance.
"Two or three days [after the ordinance passed], Scooters and More made notification to the property owners and then they vacated. They shut down their entire business," Hess said. "It clearly sent a message that our whole goal in Manchester was keeping our children safe."
Hess said that his biggest gauge of the synthetic marijuana problem in Manchester was the complaints from parents who had discovered their children - generally between the ages of 12 and 17 - using the substances, and that those complaints have dropped to almost zero today.
"We haven't had any arrests for synthetic marijuana that I know of. We haven't found anything directly since the store closed," Hess said.
Neither Babylon nor Meekins was aware of any complaints of synthetic marijuana sales currently taking place in Hampstead.
Babylon has yet to draft an ordinance for Hampstead, but hopes to introduce it as soon as possible. After the ordinance is introduced, there will be a public hearing and vote on the ordinance at a subsequent meeting.
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"Our meeting should be on March 11, and if we did get the ordinance together and reviewed by our attorney by then, it would be introduced at that meeting," he said. "If not, it will definitely be introduced at the April meeting."
