The move to ban products like K2, called a marijuana substitute, in Fort Wayne and New Haven and a ban selling the product in unincorporated areas of the county sure didn’t take long.

K2 had been around virtually unnoticed for about two years, and then in a frenzy of activity bans were proposed, debated and passed in just five weeks.

I couldn’t help wondering, what was going to happen to businesses that stocked K2?

This stuff, which they were selling quite legally, ranged from $15 to $30 a package, not cheap. A convenience store could take quite a hit if a rack of this stuff went from legal one moment to illegal the next.

So I decided to ask around.

It turns out nobody really got hammered financially. One gas station said the wholesaler who supplied it took it back once the ban took effect. Another shop said it never carried the specific brands mentioned during discussions, but just to be safe it got rid of all of its so-called aromatherapy products because it had no idea whether any of them might be illegal.

At Twenty Past Four and More on Broadway, the clerk said its inventory would just be shipped to another store in a different city.

At On the Side, a little convenience store on Sinclair Street, owner Chad Elder struck a deal with his supplier after talk of a ban began. He’d be able to return any inventory he had remaining.

Retailers’ reactions were at different poles, though.

The clerk at Twenty Past Four and More made no secret of how the ban affected him. He would not give his name, but during an interview answered the phone “this is Paul.”

“Now business sucks and people are getting fired – or laid off,” he said.

All thanks to the media, he said. This stuff had been around for two years and nobody had made a peep. The customers that he had ranged from 18-year-olds to 70-year-old men, he said. He had one regular customer who was a woman about 60.

Then people started talking about the “crime wave” linked to K2, he said sarcastically, making quotation marks with his fingers. That crime wave appeared to be one guy who drove off the road and hit someone’s deck.

“Everyone was doing good,” he said. “Now watch how many companies shut down.” He estimated that half the people who work at the two related shops he worked for would lose their jobs.

Elder reacted to the ban much differently. He’d started carrying the incense about nine months ago, and money from sales helped him add equipment to his new store, including coolers.

News coverage of sellers created some objections. The clerk at Twenty Past Four and More said he was referred to as a K2 user, but he said he doesn’t even use it.

Elder took exception to some reports that made it sound as though he sold nothing but K2. He never even carried the brands most commonly mentioned.

“Actually, they did me a favor,” Elder said. “They put it on the news and I sold out of it in four (or) five days.”

Both, though, have an interesting point of view on the ban. Before the ban, stores sold only to people 18 and older, and what they sold was prepackaged and consistent.

But, like everything else, there are home brewers.

“People are making their own in town,” the Twenty Past Four and More clerk said. They’ve bought the chemical that is used to make K2 and other products and started cranking out their own private stock.

I was surprised. I’d heard that the chemical was made in Hong Kong or someplace like that, but not being too entrepreneurial in areas like this, it never occurred to me that one could buy a whole jar of it.

The homemade stuff is a lot stronger, the clerk said. People are spraying it on whatever they have on hand, oregano, parsley, marshmallows. Some people would spray a little on. Some would put a lot.

Now that the prepackaged stuff is outlawed, “somebody’s going to do something stupid” and put way too much on a batch of herbs and something will backfire, the clerk said

Elder has heard the same thing, and he said he saw a report online of a homemade variety that made a man and his wife sick.

Suddenly, it occurred to me that outlawing this stuff in stores where it was sold openly has opened up a whole new market for the home-brew: The street, no less.

Great, I thought, a whole new product for the street peddlers, except they’ll be selling treated parsley and oregano.

And people who sell on the street usually don’t ask for IDs.