MINISTER ZEROS IN ON CRACK TUBES

DURHAM -- You may have seen "love roses" while waiting in line at the
corner convenience store to pay for a quart of milk.

About the diameter of a ballpoint pen, the length of a credit card
and containing a fake rose no bigger than a toothpick, they are sold
in dozens of Durham convenience stores.

And to hear the Rev. Melvin Whitley tell it, they're most often used
to smoke crack.

Whitley and his group, "A New East Durham," have named "love roses"
as their newest foe in the war to take back the city streets. Whitley
says local businesses are buying the Chinese import, sometimes called
"rose tubes" or "stems," in cartons of 36 at a price of $6.40. Then
they are selling them at $3.25 apiece -- 18 times the individual cost
- -- to people who will use the tubes to smoke illegal drugs. "These
people are profiting off of misery," Whitley said Friday. Known drug
users, he added, have told him the tubes are a hot commodity among crack users.

In a campaign launched Thursday called "Operation Pipe Dream,"
Whitley and fellow activists asked local businesses and the tube's
Durham distributor to stop selling "love roses."

They hand-delivered a letter to 18 stores Whitley said sold him or a
member of his group the tubes.

After Whitley handed him the letter, Smith "Smitty" Lloyd, manager of
wholesaler Thomas & Howard on South Roxboro Street, said he'd been
selling "love roses" for more than two years among "10,000 other
things." Lloyd declined to say if he planned to stop selling the
tubes to Durham businesses.

"Ninety-nine percent of Durham won't miss [the tubes] at all,"
community activist Bill Anderson said. "And the one percent that does
need it will have to learn to live without it."

Anderson, who accompanied Whitley to Thomas & Howard, said merchants
who stock the "love roses" sell between five and 10 a day. While
Whitley acknowledges that the "love roses" are a novelty item, he
says they are for nothing more than smoking crack.

Unlike Chore Boys (metal scrubbers sold for house cleaning that can
be used as a makeshift mesh screen for smoking drugs) and rolling
papers (which can be used for both tobacco and marijuana), "love
roses" have no other purpose, he said. "[Those] can be used for other
things," Whitley said. "How do you use this? Do you set it up on a nightstand?"

What's more, he said, most stores sell the item under the counter --
something, he contends, they wouldn't do if the item did have other
uses. Capt. Paul Martin, who heads the sheriff's office's Anti-Crime
Narcotics Unit, said he hadn't previously heard of the tubes being
sold in Durham. But the news didn't surprise him.

"Convenience stores have always facilitated the drug trade," Martin
said. "Years back, we used to determine how big a drug shipment would
be by how many baggies [certain stores had] on their shelves." If the
stores targeted by "A New East Durham" don't stop selling the tubes,
Whitley said, the group will contest the establishments' liquor
licenses when they come under review next year.

An easy way for citizens to take action against stores that sell
"love roses" is simply to stop shopping there, Anderson said.