The Duluth Police Department needs to keep the fuck out of other peoples' business. Fuck you, big brother.

I had a relative from Rochester ask me about this place last weekend; he apparently has heard about it and the related issues from their local paper.  

I am tired of Duluth being defined by its deviants.  

If this place is breaking the law (and that part is a little fuzzy to me at this point, I will be honest), it should be made to face the music.

Slow day @ the cop shop I guess.

Bath Salts? People are dim bulbs! 
Life sucks so bad you need to do that?

This sounds ridiculous. If he's selling products which are illegal then all it would take one undercover cop to pop down and take some merchandise back for analysis. 

If his stuff isn't illegal (yet) then police time and our taxes would be better spent dealing with actual crime.

Of course, there is a wider question of why adults should be told what they can and can't put in their bodies. Not to mention the potential dangers of new synthetic drugs which are used because the old, tried and tested ones like cannabis, while benign, are still outlawed and screened for.

Dumb on many levels.

Depending on the substance, it is stupid the stuff is illegal (it is certainly stupid that pot is illegal)

It was stupid of the owner to allow an illegal substance to be. Peddled in the store, either openly, or clandestinely.

"We are all on so many drugs with the TV on and the curtains closed."

Alright:  this synthetic shit is not safe.  

I will keep to the good, old fashioned American clones.

After further investigation, the Smokin' Camel brand appears to be a ripoff of the real Camel. I should have known it was too good a story to be true.

Jim Carlson is a patriot. I applaud his efforts to get all of us talking and thinking about this. If he wants to use his (ill-gotten?) money to fight this legal battle (Larry Flynt) we will all be better for it. 

On the other hand, I would think twice before putting any of these chemicals into my body. At least we know what the long-term effects of alcohol and marijuana are.

I hope they have their "i's" dotted and "t's" crossed. He's not the first Carlson willing to take it all the way to the Supreme Court if given the opportunity.

"Local merchant selling questionable substances to local vagrants gets shut down by authorities"

Gosh, I just love how small-town this is.

But personally, I don't like the idea of businesses randomly getting raided. A raid is never a good time. I think there should have been more public discussion before the police took such aggressive measures.

That said, people shouldn't be smoking this fake bake. I don't get why, if the government is going to outlaw drugs, why not just make it a general rule that "if it gets you high, it's illegal." Now there's all these loopholes. And now the relatively safe stuff is illegal, while all of this dangerous alternative stuff is on the shelves. WTF

(Also, the Help Wanted sign in the Star Tribune article might piss off the Republicans because they'll think that government is out to kill small business, lol)

Has anyone stopped to consider how much press (and store traffic) every one of these LPOE fake drug "controversies"  generates for the store? As much as I despise the stupid fake dope craze I have been seeing develop in Duluth, Jim Carlson is, at the end of the day, a shrewd businessman, and spot on in his legal/political views. Don't want street kids spanging tourists to buy fake dope? Don't blame the shop owner, do something about your street kid problem! (and by this I don't mean a civil-rights violating loitering law)

Okay, is it Lundgren or Guggemos who has my packet on R.O. Carlson in the 1960s? Now I'm wanting to read it all again, because the similarities here are uncanny.

See, old Mr. Carlson used to have a whole franchise of bookstores across Minnesota. He started out as a magazine recycling business, found out that he could sell packets of underwear ads to men hungry for pictures of half-clothed girls, and eventually started selling porn. To adults. Morality laws existed then, and even adults couldn't buy pictures of other naked adults, not to mention read salacious stories like Tropic of Cancer and The Story of O. It would corrupt society, you see, and especially corrupt the youth. Kids would get their hands on these things and it would make them perverts. Finally, some politician (actually I think it might have been a district attorney), got his panties in a bunch and started arresting Old Man Carlson (then a much younger man) on a regular basis, shuttering his store so many times that he had a sign made for the door that said something like, "Gone to Jail, Back in a Few Hours." And guess what, our own small-time Larry Flynt took that case all the way to the Supreme Court and he won. And now the world has gone to hell because adults (and anyone else, I guess) can look at naked pictures whenever they want. Yes, there are those of you out there who will say that only perverts look at stuff like that, that they are addicts, and they have ruined society. But guess what? The majority of America thinks what you do with your eyes and under your sheets is between you and your iPhone, as long as you've reached the mythical age of 18. 

So here we are, nearly 50 years later, and another Carlson (who only recently has reconciled with his aging father, and would probably punch me if I said he was a chip off the old block) is pricking the legal authorities with the absurdity of their stance on what adults might want to put inside their bodies. It has all the makings of a good case, if he gets a decent lawyer. Why, after all, are some substances that kill you illegal and others are legal. Is it really all about how it gets you high or is it about what chemicals are contained? They already made spray paint illegal for kids under 18, right? I have to show my ID every time I go to the Walgreens to buy nasal decongestant because somebody might want to make meth out of it, right down to the inconvenience of being denied the purchase of said substance if it goes above a certain amount in a month. So in other words, I can't buy Claritin-D for my sick partner or teenager if I've already bought my allotment for the month. Does that mean I have to drag someone down with me, despite their illness? What if they don't have a driver's license? Absurdity rules.) 

It can't be about how it kills people, because then alcohol and cigarettes would be illegal. It can't be about how it makes you act stupidly or criminally, because there are tons of things out there that make people act stupidly or criminally. (Including poverty, which I would say may or may not be illegal these days.)  So what is it? It can't even be because it makes you high, since alcohol has been making us high since time immemorial. So I guess what it comes down to is power and control over our bodies. Guess who owns us? 

Not everyone in that line is a vagrant or an addict. I admit to having purchased a packet of that incense when it first came out because a friend of mine was curious -- but was too worried about being seen purchasing it. (I didn't try it myself.) 

What it comes down to is a matter of privilege. If you're on probation, and you get caught getting high with pot, you'll go back to jail. All those natural marijuana users out there have the privilege of their connections and their legal-entanglement-free status, and they don't have to buy some chemical knockoff of the real thing. It has been shown again and again that the privileged among us, those who have jobs and status generally don't get busted for drug use/abuse and those who don't have those things find themselves in a revolving door between despair and court.

I won't pass judgement on Carlson Jr. for his attempts to make a living. And I will applaud him for his insistence that adults (should) have rights to consume whatever they want. I wish some big-time lawyer would step up and take this to the top, because it should bring the conversation back to that level: why don't adults have the right over their own eyes and bodies, as long as they aren't hurting anyone? 

My only worry is that it all will bankrupt him and embitter him. Because without that fight back in the sixties -- Old Man Carlson's stubbornness about the right to sell porn -- history might not have gone as it did. Let's hope Carlson the younger has not set himself up for a long fight that will repeat history.

B-man, by your logic, anyone who does something deliberately stupid that causes themselves harm should be denied subsidized health care. Who's going to draw those lines? How about riding an ATV without a helmet? How about jumping off the rocks at the Deeps? How about skiing down the black diamond hill when you're only a bunny? Driving too fast on a slippery road?

I think the poor deserve just as much health care as anyone else. IQ shouldn't come into the mix.

The problem with the argument that anyone who needs government assistance or publicly funded medical care should not be allowed to make stupid choices is this:  that would leave only people in certain financial situations the right to be foolish.  While I understand the frustration of paying for the consequences of bad choices, we can't start restricting our assistance to only those who have problems through no fault of their own.  What about people who eat a bad diet and suffer illness and ailments from that?  Or people who don't exercise?  Do we test for alcohol and tobacco use before allowing folks in to subsidized housing?  This sort of thing is the worst kind of class warfare.

Who wants to live in a world where we allow arbitrary judgments to determine who we help?  I'm not defending such bad choices, but there's often a lot of things we don't know that lead people down the wrong road.  Do we only help those who fall on hard times through no fault of their own?  Find the person who never made a mistake and forget the others?  I don't think so.

I couldn't agree with B-man more.  Well said.

Not to accuse anyone here of jumping on a half-witted 'get the government off my back' bandwagon, because the arguments thus far make a lot of sense, but since when do we not expect the government to tell us what we can and can't do?

We have to obey speed limits, buy car insurance, obey zoning regulations, pay taxes, wear clothes, shovel our sidewalk, get a license to drive a car and operate certain businesses, etc. I can do a lot of things which are legally prohibited without harming anyone. And I can do a lot of things which are legally prohibited without putting anyone but myself at risk of harm. But they are illegal for a reason. Do those reasons make a whole lot of sense with respect to some particular applications? No. But overall, they allow for a more organized, peaceful, and generally enjoyable society.

I am fully supportive of eliminating government regulations that prevent little or no harm, at the expense of freedoms valued by citizens. But, there has to be some sort of cost-benefit analysis. If not being permitted to threaten you with death infringes upon my right of speech, but spares you mental anguish, fear, etc., then perhaps it should remain illegal. Likewise, if some minority of our community (few of whom would extol the virtues of fake drugs were they not addicts) enjoy a cheap, legal high, but the cost is them harming themselves and others, putting greater strain on social services, hospitals, etc., then perhaps fake drugs should be illegal too.

Lastly, I understand the personal liberties debate and it has been well represented. However, legalities aside, is anyone actually in favor of what Mr. Carlson is doing? Can anyone make an argument for fake drugs being a good thing? If so, I'd love to hear that argument.

The FAA has estimated that random drug screenings cost them $44,000 to find one positive drug test.

The state of Florida, which recently implemented the same plan that b-man advocates is spending more on drug testing than they are saving on denied benefits claims.

Stupid ideas are stupid.

My post is in response to @ndy's.

Shut that place down.

@ hbh1 It would be a straw-man argument if I presented an argument stating Mr. Carlson's actions are moral, then shot it down. I didn't do that. I asked if the argument can be made because few people commented on the moral aspects, as opposed to the legal aspects.

I agree marijuana should be legalized. I agree there is a distinct difference between pseudo-pot and 'bath salts.' I understand the slippery-slope argument. And, the new state law, kinda does ban 'what makes you high' - in a sense. The standard is: "a
substance, the chemical structure of which is substantially similar to the chemical structure
of a controlled substance in Schedule I or II:
(1) that has a stimulant, depressant, or hallucinogenic effect on the central nervous system that is substantially similar to or greater than the stimulant, depressant, or hallucinogenic effect on the central nervous system of a controlled substance in Schedule I or II; or
(2) with respect to a particular person, if the person represents or intends that the substance have a stimulant, depressant, or hallucinogenic effect on the central nervous system that is substantially similar to or greater than the stimulant, depressant, or hallucinogenic effect on the central nervous system of a controlled substance in Schedule I or II.
(b) "Analog" does not include:
(1) a controlled substance;
(2) any substance for which there is an approved new drug application under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act;" - http://tinyurl.com/syntheticdrugs

You stated "When you sell something that is made to be ingested, you're entering the realm of FDA regulation." Synthetic marijuana and 'bath salts' are made to be ingested. The manufacturers and the sellers obviously know that. There is no other common use for those products. No, we shouldn't ban bath salts. But should ban products labeled as 'bath salts,' which are not bath salts, are not intended to be used as bath salts, and are clearly not used for any significant use other than ingestion. The Federal Government already bans the importation of chemicals used in both 'bath salts' and synthetic marijuana. So, all these products are imported illegally. Is it really that much of a stretch to say that we should ban the sale of products whose chemical components are already illegal?

I made a ton of bad choices as a young person. Didn't you? But I had a middle class family. So I wound up in grad school, with the family paying for it, rather than on the dole, with taxpayers paying for it. Poverty seems to me to be much more a question of bad luck than of bad choices. 

Who would choose to be a drunk or drug addict? "When I grow up, I want to lie in an alley with gravel in my cuffs and pee in my pants."

Blaming poor people for their poverty is a way of feeling safe: It can't happen to you because you're morally superior. 

I probably shouldn't post this. I'm not going to convince anyone. But I think we'd be better off with more compassion and less judgment.

Thank you, bluenewt. My thoughts exactly.

I'm not okay with denying medical care to anyone, blewnewt.  I ardently support national health care, but also don't want to turn my tax dollars over without expecting people to take better care of themselves.

Yep, a lot of people seem to go for the synthetic stuff in order to get around a drug screen.

The problem isn't with the synthetic stuff, it's with the existence of drug screens and, to a point, the illegality of recreational drugs, specifically cannabis.

The issue is that the THC in cannabis metabolizes into fat soluble compounds which are stored in the body for a long time and gradually washed out through urine.

A person can take other drugs such as heroin, cocaine, meth, PCP, MDMA, mushrooms, LSD and pass a drug screen in a few days as many of these are water soluble compounds. I'd say all of the above have greater potential for addiction and harm than cannabis.

Depending on metabolism, body fat, frequency and amount of use, a cannabis user can pass a urine screen anywhere from 7-60 days after quitting.

Even so, tests can be passed easily by diluting urine by drinking huge amounts of water and taking supplements to fool the test's dilution component or by simply substituting clean urine.

Hopefully I've shed a little light on why these tests are a bad idea - it's better to avoid cannabis and take more dangerous drug if you want to get high and have a chance of being tested. It's also better to head to TLPOE and fool around with untested synthetic stuff to increase your chances. These are both bad ideas. Also, the tests are far from accurate and can be gamed.

Of course, not doing any drugs is also an option but many people seem to want to relax and get high through legal or illegal means. Always have, always will. 


Even so, the most pervasive argument for me is that testing is a massive invasion of privacy. What a person chooses to do outside of a work environment is nobodies business. Hire and fire based upon on-the-job performance. I know plenty of recreational drug users who hold down good jobs. I know plenty of teetotal people who really ought to be fired. And vice versa.

As for people who receive benefits. I note that this idea of drug testing welfare recipients has come to the fore during a massive economic downturn. It's simple scapegoating by the political far right. When times are tough and money is scarce let's find a way to screw the poorest out of what little they have. Some of these people even have the temerity to own refrigerators and TVs. At all costs, we must direct attention away from the people who actually caused this mess.

Right?

It's poison, plain and simple. Carlson knows it. He knows it and sells it anyway. From what I've read, he tries really hard to come off as a man who's just looking out for the poor dupes who pony over their cash to buy the shit he sells, but when you take a look at the financial aspect of the situation (how many million is he putting away from selling this shit again?) ... it's easy to see where his "compassion" lies ... and it's not in the drugged masses he sells his wares to. His compassion is for his bank account.

I wish someone would prove me wrong on this, but it's gonna take an awful lot of convincing. The way I see it, Carlson's no better than a tobacco company or a dealer pushing junk.

Or McDonald's.

If Carlson's making $6 million a year selling incense, you could probably set up a little stand on the corner of Lake and Superior and take in at least a few hundred grand.

So, when's Medical coming here?

It comes down to where this is a result of preventing people from using plants that naturally grow.  A Strong argument is that synthetics are much more dangerous to people and this is true.   To me this is an indication of excessive enforcement of Cannabis which is benign to more than 99% of the people.  Seems like government money ought to be spent helping people in the first place instead of ENFORCING.