Rosepipe: A Crack Pipe By Another Name

The drug trade is a dangerous but yet very profitable arena for business that is dominated by territory and lacks any government regulation. The only thing in the way becomes competition which usually results in casualties or the government watching over the back of its citizens and waiting for them to make a mistake. Along with crack cocaine dealers supplying the drug and runners that sell it, a new planer had entered the drug trade. These players are owners, managers and clerks of some local convenience stores. All across the country franchise gas stations and mom-and-pop stores have been selling a $2 item that is very often used as a crack pipe (see picture to the right). The product is a 4 inch long glass pipe the width of a ballpoint pen with corks closing each end. Inside this object is a fake rose with a bud as small a nail on a pinky. They go by the name “rose tubes” or “love roses" and they are used to smoke crack cocaine. Local convince store owners knowingly sell "rose tubes" to drug addicts in their community

The average person assumes that these rosepipes are meant as a simple and quick gift a guy might buy for his girlfriend while he is in the store getting something else. But the typical rose buyer is a man that buys a 40-ounce bottle of beer and a Chore Boy scouring pad which he later uses as a screen for his newly made “stem," a street name for a crack pipe. Some store owners know exactly what these rosepipes are used for. In 1998, an Arizona clerk told an Arizona Republic columnist that she know the rosepipes were used for crack pipes, “addicts bought them regularly she told them. In order to dodge the laws that prohibit the sale of drug paraphernalia, workers at the convenience stores were told not to sell rosepipes if the customer referenced them as 'crack pipes', the code between the buyer and seller became asking to buy a flower."

A case in Palm Beach County targeting a Mr. Beverage store tried a clerk on charges of selling a rose, along with a copper scouring sponge to an undercover officer. The jury heard an audiotape of the officer asking the clerk if he could purchase a crack pipe. The clerk corrected the undercover officer by saying “We don’t call it that. We sell roses.” The clerk’s attorney argued in the clerk’s defense that the undercover officer pointed to items in the store during the buy, which became “leading” his client. The clerk was later acquitted. In April 2000, the Michigan Liquor Control Commission told merchants that “love roses’ or “rosepipes’ do qualify as narcotics paraphernalia and any licensee who is using, storing, exchanging or selling them will be cited with an MLCC violation. But Marjorie Kelly, editor of Business Ethics magazine in Minneapolis said that the rosepipes create a “muddy” situation for store owners. “Simply selling a store product that is not used as it was intended, I don’t think a store owner has an obligation to stop selling it,” she said. Children have sniffed glue to get high for decades she also noted. Should stores stop selling glue?

Gordon James Knowles, an assistant sociology professor at Hawaii Pacific University did research on the crack cocaine scene in Honolulu’s Chinatown while studying for his doctrine in 1996. From the addicts he observed and interacted with he learned that the addicts bought “crack kits” from convenience stores. For $8.50, the store owner pulled out a brown paper bag with a 4-inch glass tube and some copper mesh. The tube was rose-less and the kits were stashed under the counter in a hidden location. In his publication “Deception, Detection and Evasion: A Trade Craft Analysis of Honolulu, Hawaii’s Secret Crack Cocaine Traffickers, Knowles wrote “Legitimate businesses are shown to have capitalized on crack addiction by marketing and distributing drug paraphernalia related to crack cocaine consumption.”

With store owners (see picture below) that indefinitely know what rosepipes are used for are immigrant convenience store owners that have no idea what the street culture in Ameirca is like and mimics a competitor convenience store's supply thinking that if his competitor has this product in his store it must make money for him. In that situation, the store owner was lacking in information but if he purposely bought rosepipes knowing that they are later going to be used as crack pipes, the store owner is doing something wrong. What separates him from being in the drug trade? Gas is needed to drive a car just like an object is needed to smoke crack. Rosepipes have become a glamorous crack smoking device in the streets, instead of using a light bulb that the addict screwed off a porch light or a soda can. Even though this surfaced almost 10 years ago, stores continue to sell them and the cases go back and forth from court to court. The best way to get stores from selling them is by having residents’ protests against the product and boycott the stores selling drug paraphernalia. This can be achieved through awareness programs stemming from the internet; pop-up ads or banners exposing this issue. To magazines ads similar to anti-drug and tobacco. And television commercials like the The Truth or quick public service announcements.