EFFORTS AIM TO REMOVE DRUG TOOLS

The bottled miniature Love's Roses at convenience-store counters seemed
destined for the on-the-go romantic.

Individual scouring pads nearby looked to be aimed to that customer who --
while buying a candy bar or smokes -- remembered the gunked-up frying pan
at home in need of scrubbing.

Or perhaps the stuff was for crackheads.

Nine times out of 10, said one Kansas City police sergeant, crack pipes in
some neighborhoods are fashioned from the convenience-store goodies -- in
this case, the glass tube that held the fake rose and a piece of scouring pad.

And that has neighborhood residents pressuring liquor stores and gas
stations to drop the merchandise.

By some estimates, Americans spend $1 billion annually on drug paraphernalia.

The dilemma for law enforcement and retailers comes in recognizing where
innocent merchandise ends and paraphernalia begins.

Stock a head shop with 3-foot-tall bongs and become a target for federal
prosecution. But sell that plastic flower under glass and the law gets
murkier. And banning all the things that can be converted to marijuana or
crack pipes -- pop cans, apples, even car antennas -- is impossible.

The paraphernalia industry has felt a chill recently.

Tommy Chong -- who spent a career nurturing an uber-stoner persona as half
of the comedy duo Cheech and Chong -- spent nine months in federal prison
for selling bongs on the Internet. Chong canceled a tour last month because
the pot smoking in his audience threatened the terms of his parole.

Last year in Detroit, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration seized
334,000 Love's Roses that the agency described in a news release as "crack
pipes."

In Kansas City, U.S. Attorney Todd Graves last month announced indictments
of the owners of two 7th Heaven music shops, stating that selling
paraphernalia is "supporting a culture of illegal drug use."

Those indictments, followed by letters from police threatening covert
inspections and referrals to federal authorities, seem to have cleared
water pipes and bottled flowers off shelves in several area businesses.

"The head shop is the whipping boy," said Robert Vaughn, a Nashville,
Tenn., lawyer who publishes a newsletter on the evolution of paraphernalia
law. "The other places that sell stuff that might be seen as paraphernalia
are harder to go after."

Kansas City Police Sgt. James Thomas of the Central Patrol Division said
officials last year reviewed city ordinances and state law with the
rose-bottle crack pipes in mind and did not find much opportunity to
enforce paraphernalia prohibitions.

Instead, they worked with the loosely knit neighborhood group Paseo
Collaborative to pressure shops to voluntarily drop the goods from their
stores. They said that the ready availability of potential paraphernalia
allows a crack dealer to set up nearby and point buyers to the stores for
smoking materials.

"He can send his customers right in," Thomas said.

Neighborhood activists said that by dumping the bottled flowers,
convenience stores -- sensitive to the community pressure partly because
their liquor licenses might be challenged on the grounds of nearby drug
activity -- could attract more law-abiding customers who often feel
intimidated by people loitering around the stores.

"We told them they would have more business and it would be the kind of
business they should have," said Margaret May, executive director of the
Ivanhoe Neighborhood Council.

Mo Mohamadi, who owns the BP station on the Paseo near Brush Creek, said he
had begun selling Love's Roses after a vendor promised they would sell
quickly and pointed out that his competitors carried them. "I've never
smoked anything, so I didn't know they were using it for that stuff,"
Mohamadi said.

Asked by the neighborhood groups and police to dump the roses, Mohamadi did.

"Now I'm hoping that I will get more of the good customers instead of the
trouble customers," he said.

In a landmark 1994 case against the owners of a Des Moines, Iowa, head
shop, the U.S. Supreme Court clarified the ability to impose federal bans
on paraphernalia sales.

The court ruled that prosecutors need not prove that the operators knew
their customers would use paraphernalia to get high, only that smoking
drugs was the primary use of the merchandise. The court said it mattered if
a water pipe was adorned with pictures of marijuana leaves or sold amid
copies of High Times magazine.

And as Vaughn noted, "having the Love's Roses (next to) the Chore Boy
(scouring pads) makes defense much more difficult."

At Cooper's Broadway Tobacco in midtown, one sign reads, "Please don't say
the 'B' word that sounds like zong when you're in my store!" And to look
around, it does not appear stoners are likely to find bongs anymore at the
tiny shop on Broadway.

After a police warning, about a fourth of its shelves -- where water pipes
once stood for sale -- are bare. Instead, there is plenty of tobacco, kits
that claim to detoxify a body (presumably before a drug test) and a range
of hippie-style knickknacks and stickers. The store's owner declined to
comment.

On Troost Avenue, 7th Heaven sells a range of compact discs, furniture and
decorations inspired by a 1970s sensibility but now no water pipes. There,
too, some shelves are bare. Still for sale are a few pipes, quite plausibly
for tobacco, with skulls carved around the bowls in a fashion likely to
appeal to teenage boys. A lawyer for one of the store's owners declined
comment.

"It's more or less a thought crime. It is in the context of how the things
are sold," said Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National
Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

St. Pierre's group says paraphernalia laws drive people to use unsafe
smoking materials -- plastics and metals that could give off toxic fumes
when heated.

Thomas, the police sergeant, said stores that sell pipe parts in a
neighborhood already struggling with drug problems tend to encourage use
and end up concentrating users near places where they can buy paraphernalia.

"I don't think a person's going to stop getting high because we've
eliminated that item," Thomas said. "But we're going to change the kind of
person that's going into that store. And that changes the neighborhood."