Business trio hopes to even score with feds

Lyle N. Furnace and his business partners are soon going to open a hookah lounge in Potsdam. If he can fit it on the sign, I suggest they name it, "Suck on this, federal government!" http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20090620/NEWS05/306209934

Lyle is the Potsdam businessman who owns what we used to call a "head shop" when I was a teenager. Among other things, head shops sold things like tie-dyed T-shirts, incense and pipes to smoke marijuana. Maybe it was illegal in the 1970s to sell pipes that people used for smoking marijuana, but I can't remember anyone getting busted for doing it. Lyle got busted for doing it in 2004.

This is the short version of the story: federal agents came into his store, Happy Daze, and told him he shouldn't sell pipes that people use for smoking marijuana. The feds apparently didn't see the signs in the store that said tobacco was the intended weed to be used in the pipes he sold. In any event, he was arrested on federal charges a while later. Then he pleaded guilty to selling drug paraphernalia and was sentenced to a year of probation. Feds 1, Lyle 0.

I don't think any federal agents got promoted for the victory. Getting rid of pipes is not going to solve America's drug problem. Nobody is ever going to launch a national anti-drug campaign with the slogan, "Pipes are dumb." Someone intent on a night of reefer madness will whittle a potato into a pipe if they stumble across a bag of dope and have a match. If you want to talk about dumb, it's that there are laws against selling pipes and there are agents that we pay real American dollars to enforce them.

And where there is dumb, there is often dumber. Listen to this: Happy Daze is still open and it legally sells pipes which could be used to smoke marijuana. They are called hookahs. You suck a hookah hose, drawing smoke from whatever is in its bowl through water before it hits your lungs. It's legal to sell those. Selling a water pipe - a device in which you suck on a hose, drawing smoke from whatever is in its bowl through water before it hits your lungs - could get you time in federal prison. Make sense of those laws and the first bowl at Lyle's lounge is on me.

Lyle managed to miss out on prison - he says by "this much," holding a thumb and index about an inch apart in front of his bushy gray beard when I talked to him this week. But it cost him more than $50,000 in inventory the feds took from him. And he has a federal charge on a rap sheet that he said before this ordeal contained nothing more than traffic tickets. All for selling water pipes.

Neither Lyle nor his business partners, daughter Jessika T. and her fiance, Darin S. Richards, will admit to consciously relishing the beautiful irony that they hope water pipes help them recover some of the money they lost because of water pipes. Jessika talks about business plans and researching other hookah lounges. Lyle talks about how they chose not to offer alcoholic drinks at the lounge. Darin points out that everything smoked at the lounge will be tobacco- and nicotine-free. I couldn't get one of them to say on the record that they chose to open a hookah lounge so they could say, "Suck on this, federal government."

Maybe we'll see that on their shingle when the lounge opens in the fall. Hope it fits.