TO PUT IT BLUNTLY, HE'S TAKING ANTI-DRUG FIGHT TO STREETS

"A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke."

- - Rudyard Kipling

"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

- - Sigmund Freud

AND SOMETIMES a certain kind of cigar gets hijacked by druggies.

That dawned on Jerry Rocks last fall when he noticed young adults
buying Phillies Blunts at the Sunoco APlus near his Fox Chase home.
The store also carried rolling papers and cigar wrappers (an empty
rolled sheet of tobacco), both used to smoke marijuana.

Drug paraphernalia, right there in Fox Chase, an upper-middle-class
chunk of the Northeast with neat homes, clipped lawns and few visible
signs of decay.

Rocks, 54, wants to keep it that way. To him (he's a detective in the
D.A.'s office by day) the easy availability of drug gear is a
harbinger. As spring follows the robin, crime follows drug sales
because of drug dealers and drug turf. "Gun violence and drugs go
hand in hand," it says in the Book of Rocks.

What Rocks saw at Sunoco - and Wawa, too - he didn't like. Blunts in
soda-fountain flavors, rolling papers, fruity wrappers, all sold
legally, even next to Northeast and St. Hubert's high schools.

Known more for their availability than their quality, blunts are to
true cigar smokers what the Yugo is to Formula One drivers. Some
buyers scoop tobacco out of the blunt and reload it with pot,
sometimes laced with dangerous additives such as cocaine, mushrooms,
PCP and LSD.

To raise the alarm, Rocks papered the neighborhood with flyers and
knocked on neighbors' doors like a cop seeking leads. He organized a
grass-roots group called Not in My Neighborhood. He turned a
2-by-4-foot pegboard, topped by the familiar yellow-and-blue Sunoco
trademark, into the Blunt Board, a display of the many types of drug
paraphernalia sold legally in Philadelphia.

In the Book of Rocks, marijuana is a gateway drug, meaning it leads
to harder drugs. But if pot always led straight to heroin, half of
Congress would be junkies.

Rocks' better point is that drug use is wrong for kids, and the
papers, wrappers and blunts are big "welcome" signs. The
silver-haired detective has no illusions of stopping the river of
drugs in America, but he hopes to slow it in his own neighborhood
before it brings violence.

Ignored at first, he kept hammering at Sunoco and Wawa, calling them
out on their corporate promises to be good neighbors.

Not in My Neighborhood picketed APlus locations. Last Thursday, Rocks
stood in front of Sunoco HQ on Market Street with his Blunt Board.

He made himself a pain in the ass.

Sunoco spokesman Gerald Davis told me a vice president earlier met
with Rocks, and rolling papers and cigar wrappers were ordered out of
convenience stores about a month ago. He seemed genuinely shocked
when I told him I bought a Purple Haze wrapper a week earlier at the
Sunoco station at 7941 Bustleton Ave.

Davis called back to say a letter would go out to all franchisees
reminding them that rolling papers and wrappers are prohibited.
Blunts still will be sold.

This brings us to Councilman Brian O'Neill, who attended a Fox Chase
Homeowners Association meeting, heard the Book of Rocks and saw the
Blunt Board. O'Neill then introduced a bill to ban the sale of
blunts, rolling papers, wrappers and other drug paraphernalia.

Since every member of Council signed on as a co-sponsor, passage
should be assured. If passed, the law would have more teeth than a
voluntary ban, to which a number of stop-and-go convenience stores
agreed in late 2004 following an expose of drug paraphernalia by
former Daily News Urban Warrior Carla Anderson.

Wawa has promised not to oppose O'Neill's bill, and after after
Rocks' one-man show Thursday in front of Sunoco, he told me Sunoco VP
of Retail Operations Blake Heinemann told him the oil giant would not
oppose the bill. When I tried to verify that, Sunoco declined comment.

Will banning drug paraphernalia end our drug plague? No.

Will it help? Yes.

Especially if other community activists start reading from the Book of Rocks.