This KC suburb just tried to ban ‘gas station heroin.’ Here’s how it’s going so far
I drove to Gladstone Thursday afternoon. I was trying to gauge the rule of law up there.
I’d had a couple of conversations the day before that made me want to pay a visit to that Northland municipality, population about 28,000. The first was with Maggie Nurrenbern, a Democratic State Senator who represents part of Gladstone. She was one of a half-dozen Missouri state legislators, Democrats and Republicans, I contacted this week to ask about what bills we might see in the upcoming session relating to 7-hydroxymitragynine, better known as 7-OH.
Last month, I published a series of stories on 7-OH, a new, highly addictive synthetic drug sold at smoke shops and gas stations (it is sometimes referred to as “gas station heroin”). 7-OH is several times more potent than morphine, sold in candy-colored packaging, and completely unregulated in Missouri and Kansas. Imagine if a 12-year-old could walk into a gas station and exit with as much Oxycontin as they could afford. That is more or less the situation we have on our hands.
Nurrenbern, it turns out, had read my 7-OH series and brought it up while meeting in early October with Fred Farris, Gladstone’s chief of police. Farris hadn’t heard of 7-OH.
“So the two of us got up and took a ride in his patrol car to the closest smoke shop, a place on North Oak,” Nurrenbern told me. “And I went in and asked them if they sold it, and of course they did.” No surprise there. The stuff is everywhere, and few elected officials or law enforcement agencies around here have prioritized doing anything about it.
Farris, though, decided to act. He thought he might have a law on the books to force 7-OH off shelves in Gladstone.
About a year ago, his department pushed through an ordinance targeting synthetic cannabinoids — “the ones that come in packaging that look like Skittles and gummy worms,” Farris said. Enforcement on the cannabinoid products has hit a snag, though, due to confusion in Missouri surrounding the legality of hemp-derived products like Delta-8 and HHC.
“Until that gets sorted out, there’s not much we can do about those,” Farris said.
But he thought the language of the ordinance might apply to something like 7-OH, which isn’t hemp-derived.
“We had legal look into the wording, and what we heard back was that if this is synthetic, and it mimics an opioid or a cannabinoid, it’s illegal in Gladstone,” Farris said. “And we know that 7-OH mimics the effects of opioids.”
So on Oct. 7, Farris told one of his sergeants to hit the dozen or so smoke shops and gas stations in the city and inform them all that they had 24 hours to get 7-OH out of their stores.
“Several pulled it immediately,” Farris said. “The others we put on notice. We said, ‘We’re coming back and if we see it, we’re going to make arrests.’”
Inside the smoke shops
I was curious what I might see a week later if I dropped by a few of those smoke shops. Businesses that operate in legal gray zones have a tendency to treat regulations more as suggestions than obligations. And in the few short years that it’s been on the market, 7-OH has become a major profit center for the small businesses that sell it. Addictive stuff is good for sales.
I visited the stores as a consumer, not identifying myself as a journalist, in order to get a more accurate read of what was on offer.
First up was The Hub at 6410 N. Oak Trafficway. The Hub is one of the larger smoke-shop chains in the Kansas City area, with five locations. It was in compliance. The store clerk helpfully informed me that I could visit any of The Hub’s four other locations, all of which still sell 7-OH.
The picture was a little hazier at Happy Rock Smoke Shop and Vapes, up the road at 334 N.E. 72nd St. This is the store Nurrenbern and Farris visited together.
Pinned above the counter was one package of Roxy brand 7-OH, but that was the only 7-OH product I spotted. I asked if there was more 7-OH behind the counter. The clerk told me that he could order some for me from Happy Rock’s Liberty location to pick up later, but they were playing it safe because a state senator had been in there last week asking questions about 7-OH. The Roxy was still for sale, though.
I called Happy Rock the next day and was told by an employee that he couldn’t discuss the 7-OH situation with me. He said I should email the shop’s owner, Sai Alomari, who hasn’t responded to my message.
On the far north end of Gladstone, Discount Smokes and Liquor at 7603 N. Oak Trafficway seemed to be openly flouting the ordinance. Several shots and pills of 7-OH of a brand called O’Heaven were displayed right next to the cash register. These 7-OH pills came in a seven-day pack, each slot marked with a day of the week, a kind of nod to those plastic organizers old people use for their meds.
I called owner Seema Hudda afterward. She didn’t seem to realize that 7-OH was different from kratom, a different smoke-shop product — a plant whose alkaloids chemists use to manufacture and synthesize 7-OH. When Gladstone police stopped by last week to check the shop, she showed them the O’Heaven products, calling them kratom. They told her that was fine — but it was obvious from our conversation that neither she nor the officers really knew what they were dealing with.
“I can take it off the shelves — I’ll do that now,” Hudda told me. “We can sell earth kratom, though, right?” I said I wasn’t sure and that she should check with Gladstone police about that.
No 7-OH at Gladstone Discount Smoke at 6034 N.E. Antioch Road. Plenty of kratom and other mysterious products near the counter at the KC Quick gas station at 5810 N.E. Antioch Road, including a 16 oz. freezer bag filled with $40 worth of powdered kava, an herbal sedative once used in island rituals and now sold alongside synthetic drugs. But no 7-OH.
“What you see is what we have,” KC Quick’s clerk finally said, a little annoyed by all my questions.
The clerk at VaporWyse, 5733 N.E. Antioch Road, an older gentleman in a tie-dye shirt, almost flinched when I asked if they had any 7-OH.
“No, no, no,” he said. “That stuff’s really bad for you. We don’t sell that.”
He expressed genuine concern about the request and recommended a few types of kratom leaf products that he said others have found useful in weaning themselves off 7-OH. He also suggested I check out r/quitting7oh, a subreddit that, as I’ve written previously, mixes practical advice on quitting the drug with bleak cautionary tales about the wreckage it inflicts on the lives of those who’ve become addicted to it.
I ended my Northland afternoon near the intersection of Antioch and Vivion roads, just beyond Gladstone’s borders. It was a reminder of how widely available 7-OH is in the rest of the metro, where enforcement is nonexistent.
At Vapor World (5050 N. Antioch), I counted more than a hundred different varieties of 7-OH for sale. At The Hub 3 (2631 N.E. Vivion Road, sister operation of the first shop I visited), the first product the clerk recommended when I asked about 7-OH was Thrive Supreme 7, which makes 80 milligram tablets.
I was momentarily stunned. Most of what’s on the market is in the 15-30 milligram range per tablet. Eighty milligrams is one of the highest 7-OH pill dosages I have ever seen in the wild. But the fact is that these businesses could sell 500 milligram doses if they wanted, because there are no laws around any of this in Missouri or Kansas.
I mentioned all this on Friday to Farris, who said he’d look into it. He said offenders would face a mandatory court appearance, with a penalty to be determined by a judge.
Nurrenbern said she is already workshopping a 7-OH bill for the upcoming Missouri legislative session.
“We’re looking at something broader in nature, because these companies create a new synthetic thing every year,” she said. “So we’re trying to craft a definition that can account for all of this stuff.”
I asked Farris if he thought the relatively small size of Gladstone made enforcement of a 7-OH ban easier than it would be for, say, a sprawling city like Kansas City. He didn’t think so.
“It’s really just about getting an ordinance written so that you have it when you need it,” he said. “Maybe Kansas City doesn’t have the resources to hit hundreds of stores regularly, but if you have that ordinance, you can do something when you come across a bad actor. And that’s what we’re going to be doing here.”
Nurrenbern agreed.
“I would encourage other cities to look at the existing ordinances they have on the books,” she said.
