BILL TARGETS TOOLS OF DRUG USE

Glass vials used for smoking crack are easy to get in some
neighborhoods. Lawmakers hope that making people supply ID when
buying them will discourage users.

RALEIGH -- In Raleigh's rougher neighborhoods, $4 will buy a glass
crack pipe with a fake rose or the innards of a cheap ballpoint pen
stuffed inside for a disguise. You don't buy them on the street, but
from a corner shop clerk who keeps a stash hidden behind the counter.

To police and to neighbors, "glass roses" are a legal nuisance. But a
bill traveling through the N.C. House would require anyone buying a
short glass vial to provide a name, address, signature and photo ID
- -- an effort aimed at curbing the sale of drug paraphernalia.

"You walk in these stores, and it kind of slaps you in the face,"
said Rep. Mark Hilton, a Catawba County Republican who sponsored the
bill. "It's obvious what they're used for."

Pipes can be found in Hilton's district, or in Durham, where the Rev.
Melvin Whitley has pressed for a ban, and in any neighborhood
statewide where crack cocaine thrives. But samples shown to House
members came from Southeast Raleigh, where the glass vials can be
bought along with plastic tubes equipped with a blade for slicing
open small cigars. "It takes the guts out of the cigar; you throw it
on the ground and put your marijuana in," state Alcohol Law
Enforcement Agent Israel Morrow told a group of Southeast Raleigh
neighbors last week. "If you look in my evidence locker, I have beer
cans that are used as crack pipes." House Bill 722 would require that
any glass pipe of a certain length or diameter be kept behind the
counter, which is already the custom in most stores. But Hilton hopes
that signing a register would be a deterrent, and also give parole
and probation officers a chance to see what their clients are doing.
Such a bill has surfaced before in the House. In a previous
incarnation, Hilton said, the rules also extended to rolling papers,
which the tobacco industry opposed. Hilton would like to see the
cigar tubes subject to regulation -- cigar smokers know of no reason
to slice a stogie lengthwise -- but he is wary of bringing out new
opponents. "I don't want the bill to die again," Hilton said. Rep.
Deborah Ross, the Raleigh Democrat who chairs the Judiciary Committee
where the glass vial bill has been assigned, said she hopes to bring
it up for a hearing before mid-May. Crackdowns have happened in
California, where alcohol agents will pull liquor licenses from
stores that sell pipes. But in Oregon, police have described
paraphernalia laws as difficult to enforce. Merchants often say they
can't guess their customers' intent.

New Bern Mini Mart in Southeast Raleigh carries both the glass roses
and the EZ Splitz cigar cutters behind the counter. A merchant
charged $2.12 for the cutter, but he accepted a dollar in quarters
instead. The merchant explained that the owner was out of town,
started to explain that he doesn't care how people use the
merchandise, then declined to talk further because he did not wish to
get in trouble.

Downtown, "Taz" Zarka refuses to sell the pipes or cutters at any of
his four convenience stores, calling them both immoral and bad for
business. Merchants who sell them, he said, are lured by the chance
to sell 30-cent merchandise at greater than a 100 percent markup.

"All they're thinking about is a dollar sign," he said. "It's greed.
All it's going to bring you is trash. You take care of your community
and your community takes care of you. That's the only equation." At a
community meeting in Southeast Raleigh, Morrow asked rhetorically
whether crack smokers can find other means if pipes become too much
trouble. "Yes, they can," he said.

But they'll have to find a new way to slap neighbors in the face.