Philadelphia Representative Amen Brown is leading the effort to crack down on illegal smoke shops in the city.<\/p>\n
He says many of these types of stores in his district are engaging in unlawful activities, selling drugs and out-of-state cigarettes. He’s intent on sending a clear message.<\/p>\n
“We don’t need establishments like this just popping up overnight, over the weekend with a grand opening sign saying come buy this weed,” said Brown.<\/p>\n
Brown said Friday morning, after days of an undercover operation, the 4026 Convenience Store was raided in West Philadelphia.<\/p>\n
“It’s not the first time it was hit, but first time we successfully hit it. It had guns, and drugs and cash,” said Brown.<\/p>\n
Brown says one of his biggest concerns is the young customers.<\/p>\n
“More importantly, they were serving the children; the kind of marijuana they were selling is contaminated with multiple deadly pathogens,” said Brown.<\/p>\n
Rep. Brown says so far, the operation, in partnership with Philadelphia Police and the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office, has shut down 13 similar smoke shops in the last three months.<\/p>\n
Neighbors tell Action News the 4026 site has been problematic for years.<\/p>\n
“It’s 24 hours. People just pull up all day, every day,” said Cynthia Ebo. “I knew it had to be something.”<\/p>\n
Brown says the team has identified 30 smoke shops they plan to pursue within his district.<\/p>\n
Police confirmed there was a narcotics operation at the locations but didn’t reveal if there were any arrests or pending charges against owners.<\/p>\n
Action News made multiple attempts to reach the owner of the convenience store for comment, but we are still waiting to hear back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Philadelphia Representative Amen Brown is leading the effort to crack down on illegal smoke shops in the city.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":279497,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[116759,4591,116075,69,71,70],"class_list":["post-279496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-amen-brown","tag-brown","tag-hes","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279496\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/279497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}