Montgomery County prosecutors announced felony drug charges Wednesday against nearly 50 businesses that they say illegally sold powerful THC products, the latest effort in an ongoing crackdown against smoke shops selling unregulated drugs.
District Attorney Kevin Steele said 46 retailers — including shops, gas stations, and corner stores throughout the county in towns including Haverford, Pottstown, and Narberth — ignored warnings from his office that some of the products on their shelves were illegal to sell in Pennsylvania outside of a medical marijuana dispensary.
“I think folks thought we were blowing smoke, for lack of a better way to say this, about the things that were coming if they didn’t abide,” Steele said. “They haven’t abided, and so … they are facing felony possession with intent to deliver charges.”
The crackdown comes about a year after Steele’s office issued a scathing grand jury report on the proliferation of smoke shops selling illegal THC products. The 107-page report was influenced in part by an Inquirer investigation that found some over-the-counter products were not legal at all — and often rife with harmful contaminants.
The Inquirer began testing over-the-counter THC products in the spring of 2025, at a time when Pennsylvania law enforcement showed little interest in examining the products sold openly at smoke shops.
But enforcement has risen steadily as storefronts multiply across the region — outnumbering schools in Montgomery County, according to Steele. The shops also peddle an array of other potentially dangerous products, from ultra-addictive 7-OH kratom pills masquerading as health supplements to unregulated psychedelic drugs baked into chocolate bars.
Shops attempt to sell these supposedly legal THC products through a legal loophole set by the 2018 U.S. Farm Bill, which allows hemp-derived products to be sold if they contain minuscule amounts of Delta-9 THC.
However, the vapes, gummies, and other items sold in the shops investigated by his office were potent, and had enough THC in them to be intoxicating, according to the prosecutor. Some, he said, contained as much as 2,000 mg of THC and were sold in colorful packaging that seemed to target children.
The charges were not filed against individual owners, but against the businesses themselves, Steele said. Penalties can range from fines to the revocation of business licenses.
If necessary, Steele added, his office could file more serious charges, including racketeering, against individual owners.
He stressed, however, that his efforts are not “anti-business.”
“What we’re trying to do here today is to get businesses operating in Montgomery County to comply with the law, because we care about kids and public safety in our community,” he said.
Steele’s office sent warning letters to vape shops across the county in December after releasing the grand jury report.
The letters warned the shops’ owners that the sale of high-THC products was illegal, and asked them to check their inventory and remove any offending products from their shelves.
Follow-up checks by investigators in subsequent months found that 46 of them were still selling the products, triggering the criminal charges.
“I had hoped when we did the grand jury report and put people on notice that would be enough,” Steele said. “It was not.”
Last year’s grand jury report was the product of a joint investigation with prosecutors in Bucks and Chester Counties. It found many stores used “misleading packaging and fraudulent lab reports” to openly sell banned substances across all three counties, and called for greater enforcement of store operators who “knowingly violate the law.”
Nearly 300 stores selling hemp operate in Montgomery County, outnumbering schools, according to the report, a reality it described as “a public health crisis unfolding in plain sight.”
The report’s findings referenced the 2025 Inquirer investigation that found samples of these products purchased from different stores in the Philadelphia region exceeded the 0.3% Delta-9 THC potency level cited in the Farm Bill, making them illegal to sell in Pennsylvania.
Those items contained Delta-9 THC at levels from 200% to more than 2,400% over the federal limit. Six samples, strengthened by other hemp-derived THC variants, were as potent as most dispensary-grade marijuana.
The Inquirer also found that some companies deceived consumers about what was in their products by digitally altering lab results to remove evidence of contamination. Seven of the samples tested by The Inquirer contained a potentially harmful fungus. Three contained pesticides, including one illegal chemical.
Owners of some of the stores investigated by Montgomery County in 2025 told detectives they removed illegal products from their shelves after The Inquirer’s investigation was published that July, according to the grand jury report.
“We are trying to address this for the sake of the children in our community, for the sake of the public who is misinformed about what these items are, and to deface myths that are out there that if a store is selling something like that, it must not be harmful,” Steele said. “That is not the case.”
Staff writer Max Marin contributed to this article.
