Pubdate: Fri, 18 Aug 2006
Source: News & Observer (Raleigh, NC)
Copyright: 2006 The News and Observer Publishing Company
Contact: http://www.newsobserver.com/484/story/433256.html
Website: http://www.news-observer.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/304
Author: Michael Biesecker
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?228 (Paraphernalia)

IT'S A DREAM OF GETTING RID OF PIPES

DURHAM - A coalition of Durham residents is fighting drug use in 
their neighborhoods by pressuring convenience store owners to stop 
selling crack pipes thinly veiled as novelty gifts.

Marketed as a "Rose in a Glass" or "Love Roses," the product is a 
4-inch-long glass tube with a tiny fake flower stuffed inside. Blow 
out the flower and the tempered glass tube, called a "stem" on the 
street, is perfect for smoking rocks of crack cocaine.

Over the past week, members of Operation Pipe Dreams have visited 31 
stores in Durham -- covertly buying the tubes and then giving those 
behind the counter a letter asking them to stop selling the item. If 
they refuse, the letter promises the group will pressure public 
officials to suspend the shop's license to sell beer and wine. It is 
illegal in North Carolina to sell drug paraphernalia.

Most of the merchants targeted so far are locally owned, mom-and-pop 
operations clustered in the low-income neighborhoods on Durham's east 
side. Members of Operation Pipe Dreams plan to expand their crusade 
to shops in Southeast Raleigh today.

"This isn't just a Durham problem. It's a statewide problem," said 
the Rev. Melvin Whitley, the associate minister of Durham's Ebenezer 
Missionary Baptist Church and a leader of the operation. "These 
stores are aiding and abetting misery. They are putting profit ahead 
of community."

Whitley said the tubes are imported from China and sold through a 
local wholesaler for 18 cents each. The small neighborhood stores 
then resell them at a substantial markup, usually for about $3. The 
stems often are made readily available with two other items needed to 
smoke crack -- cheap disposable lighters and copper scouring pads 
that, when cut into small pieces, are stuffed into the tubes as a 
makeshift filter.

Whitley said he was able to buy the product at a store a couple of 
blocks from his home, even though the shopkeeper knew him personally. 
Asked why he would sell a crack pipe to a man of the cloth, the clerk 
responded that it wasn't his place to judge. Another store owner said 
he couldn't stop selling the pipes because it would put him at a 
competitive disadvantage, but he agreed to discount the inflated price.

"He just didn't get it," Whitley said. "That'll hurt your spirit."

Operation Pipe Dreams did appear to be having an effect in the Bull 
City on Thursday, even if just to push the sale of stems out of the open.

At Atlantic Food Mart on Angier Avenue, next door to a small Baptist 
church, a clerk cloistered behind a wall of bullet-resistant glass 
told a reporter they no longer sold the tubes.

A block away at the M&M Mart, the clerk spontaneously lost the 
ability to speak English when asked about Love Roses. At the Quick 
Mart on Briggs Avenue, owner Sam Jaber acknowledged that he had sold 
the pipes in the recent past but couldn't say exactly when he 
stopped. He claimed he didn't know the Love Roses were used to smoke 
crack until Whitley told him.

"It's high profit, but it's not worth it," Jaber said. "I support a 
clean East Durham."

As Jaber spoke from behind the counter, a wide array of 
fruit-flavored, pre-hollowed-out cigar wrappers commonly used for 
assembling marijuana "blunts" was displayed on a shelf behind him. He 
claimed not to know what those were used for, either.

Whitley is skeptical of shop owners who claim ignorance of the tube's 
true use, rather than its disguise as a romantic gesture.

"I don't know too many women who would accept one," Whitley said of 
the Love Roses. "If I brought one home to my wife, I'd be living in a 
shed out back."

A.B. Turner, the owner of Community Grocery on North Guthrie Avenue, 
was more forthcoming. He said that he knows the pipes are used to 
smoke crack and that he intends to keep selling them -- though he 
claimed not to have any in stock Thursday.

"It's common sense," Turner said. "Ain't nobody going to pay $3 for a 
little glass tube unless they have a use for it."
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