Bucks County District Attorney Joe Khan filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the owners of a Buckingham Township vape shop, seeking to close the business, which he said sold potent THC products, as well as tobacco and kratom, to minors.
Khan announced the suit, filed in the Bucks County Court of Common Pleas, outside of Zaza Cigar & Vape after what he described as months of investigating complaints about the business from parents in the Central Bucks School District.
“This store is selling marijuana cigarettes under the guise that they’re selling products that are legal and perfectly safe for people to own and to use, but that’s not the truth,” Khan said. “Thanks to the work of our detectives, we have uncovered the fact that this is a store that is really running an illicit drug operation under the cover and guise of a legitimate business operation.”
In the suit, Khan said the business was the only one of the county’s 580 licensed tobacco shops that sold tobacco to undercover minors 100% of the time during routine enforcement checks.
During at least five documented sales this year, he said, clerks at the store did not even do “the bare minimum to comply with Pennsylvania state law,” and, in one instance, sold kratom, which was listed as a Schedule 1 drug last week by the federal government, to a minor.
Khan is seeking an emergency court order to close the store, located in a shopping center on Durham Road, and said he has launched a parallel, criminal investigation into its owners and their business practices.
The lawsuit did not name the owners of the business, and no one answered the phone at the store on Wednesday. Court records did not list a lawyer for the business.
“This is a store that does not care in the slightest about the welfare of our children, but we do, and that’s why we’re here to stand up for them,” Khan said.
Court records show Zaza Cigar & Vape was fined twice this year for selling tobacco to minors. Khan said the vape store viewed these fines as “simply the cost of doing business.”
The larger concern, he said, is the access the business is providing to THC products.
The items are legal to sell through a provision in the 2018 U.S. Farm Bill, which legalized hemp products that contain a minuscule amount of Delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive compound in marijuana.
But Khan said the products sold at Zaza Vape & Cigar contained an illegal, more potent amount of Delta-9 and were offered for purchase by minors.
A 2025 Inquirer investigation 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 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.
“We are not going to wait to take action,” Khan said. “That’s why we went to court today to put a stop to this behavior, so that the kids who go to Central Bucks East, the kids who go to Buckingham Elementary, which is less than a mile away from where I stand, are not going to be exploited by a business like that.”
Khan’s lawsuit is the latest example of his application of the civil-enforcement powers afforded to his office in pursuing cases that present ongoing harm to the public.
Earlier this year, he filed suit against the company that operates Roblox, an online video game, for what he described as lax security features that allow child predators to contact underage players.
Khan filed another lawsuit against the owners of a boarding house in Dublin that he described as squalid and dangerous.
Both cases are ongoing.