The city of Duluth won another round in its ongoing battle to put a notorious downtown head shop out of business.
On Monday, the Minnesota Court of Appeals upheld the injunctions that closed the Last Place on Earth, whose owner had been openly selling banned forms of synthetic drugs.
Store owner James Carlson was convicted of 51 felony counts stemming from his synthetic drug businesses and is in prison awaiting sentencing.
In the year since Duluth secured a court order to close Last Place on Earth, city officials say, crime and emergency calls have declined sharply. It's a far cry from the days when customers would line up down the block to get into the last store in the state that still sold products such as synthetic marijuana and bath salts.
"It's been great for downtown. It's amazing how much has changed in just a year," said Duluth City Attorney Gunnar Johnson. "What was a real scourge on the city, on our business community, on our public safety — the police department, the fire department, the hospitals — has been lifted."
In the first 23 days after Last Place on Earth closed, the city saw an almost 44 percent drop in emergency calls to the neighborhood.
At Carlson's trial, emergency room physicians from St. Luke's hospital testified that they went from seeing at least one synthetic drug overdose case per shift — raving, screaming patients who sometimes had to be placed into induced comas until the drugs left their system — to seeing none, said assistant city attorney Nathan LaCoursiere. "It's like night and day. It's like the lights were turned back on" in downtown Duluth since the shop closed.
In his appeal, Carlson's attorney Randall Tigue argued unsuccessfully that the city's local ban on synthetic drugs was unconstitutional and the public nuisance charges against were unfounded. The appellate court's three-judge panel affirmed the district court's permanent injunction against the business.
