Steller: Spice raids shut store, but 'show must go on'

A year ago, I walked into a smoke shop in South Tucson and looked around awkwardly at the pipes and bongs. Really, I was waiting for Bobbi Mishler to come inside as planned.

After a couple of minutes she came in, asked the clerk for a package of “King Kong” Spice, bought it for $5 and left. I followed a minute later, and we drove together back to Santa Rita Park. There, I watched her and a group of friends smoke the Spice, then disappear into their highs, some of them convulsing and vomiting.

Despite the bad side effects, Spice was king among many of the homeless and poor drug abusers in Tucson back then. A tiny package went a long way.

Today that store, Tobacco & More, at 2020 S. Sixth Ave., is closed. But Spice and its relatives in the drug world aren’t going anywhere, as my colleague Carmen Duarte showed in Saturday’s Arizona Daily Star. The demand is too high.

Tobacco & More, known more commonly as “the 24/7,” was one of several smoke shops where DEA agents and local police served warrants July 28. But that wasn’t its first run-in with authorities.

Even when I went on my sort-of-undercover buy with Mishler, the business was already under the city of South Tucson’s thumb. The owners had signed a “crime-free” agreement with the city, specifying that they wouldn’t sell Spice and similar products, Police Chief Michael Ford told me.

“They knew and understood it was not legal,” Ford said.

But as decades of the War on Drugs have shown, enforcement alone doesn’t stop people from selling or using illegal drugs.

That’s especially the case with Spice, also known as K2 and by other names, because it is simply a chemical compound sprayed on vegetable matter.

The makers just change the formula to stay ahead of legal prohibitions.

Last week, smokers I spoke with at Santa Rita Park bemoaned the loss of their nearest supplier, Tobacco & More, but assured me there were others. One pointed me to Zuzu Smoke Shop at 5452 S. 12th Ave., even though DEA agents had visited that store as well last month.

So I swung by Zuzu Friday morning and asked if they had Spice to sell. The answer? Not really. They didn’t have the cheap little packages I had seen purchased at Tobacco & More, but they did have a different type of $19.99 herbal concoctions for sale, which they assured me will get a person high.

Zuzu’s packages state they are intended for smoking, unlike the cheaper stuff, which says it is “incense” or “potpourri” not intended for human consumption.

“People come in asking for that stuff all the time, but we don’t sell it,” employee Scott Van Doren said. “That’s why we’re still open.”

The demand means it won’t go away any time soon, even if DEA and local agencies crack down.

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I met with Mishler last week because she had looked me up almost a year after our first meeting in the park. She no longer does Spice and is living in transitional housing. But she recalls the allure of the drug vividly.

“There’s nothing else I ever had that had me picking stuff up off the floor,” she said.

What did she mean by that? I asked.

“Carpet farming” — crawling on the floor looking for any spilled scraps that she could smoke.

“I went without for a couple of days and went through withdrawal,” she said. “I noticed there was a physical addiction, and that freaked me out.

“I reserve my addiction for co-dependent relationships,” she joked.

When I wrote about her last year, I called Mishler by her nickname, “Holy Hel.” In truth, I didn’t know her real name or those of any of the other smokers at the park. She got in some trouble with her friends there for going with me to the store to buy Spice.

But I didn’t name the store and, as she pointed out, “They weren’t even secretive about it.”

These days, stores that do sell will undoubtedly be more secretive, and some of the market will go underground, people selling their own baggies as with the product Spice was invented to imitate — marijuana.

But even if it’s a little harder to get, there are no fewer potential consumers.

As Mishler said, “There will always be demand for a low-price high.”

Indeed, when I visited Santa Rita Park Friday morning, a man who last year tried to keep others from telling me where they buy Spice was hanging around in an I (Heart) Boobies T-shirt. He told me flatly, “I’m an addict.”

“I’ve been addicted for seven years,” he went on. “If I don’t have it, I’ll spend my day looking for it.”

I asked what the raids have done to the supply.

In response, he sang a tune: “The show must go on,” he warbled, “the show must go on.”