The Boston City Council has proposed a ban on the sale of “four-inch glass tubes featuring fake mini-roses” commonly sold at convenience stores, because they’re actually crack pipes. From BostonNow:
They look like novelty items, but they’re not. For sale at convenience stores in Boston, four-inch glass tubes featuring fake mini-roses inside of them are actually crack pipes.BostonNOW’s reporter entered a Blue Hill Avenue store yesterday afternoon, asked the clerk for a “straight shooter,” and received the glass tube, flower and a steel wool pad (to be used as a filter when smoking crack).
In response to situations like these, City Councilor Chuck Turner and other councilors, including Felix Arroyo and Michael Flaherty, have filed an ordinance to prohibit the sale of these pipes, also known as “rosebuds” or “stems.”
“As a community, we need to work together on issues of drugs and violence,” said Turner. “The business community needs to work with us as well. We have to find many creative ways to lessen the use of drugs.”
“For young people to see [crack pipes] so openly in stores, they think it’s acceptable,” said Arroyo, “and it is not.”
The ordinance, if passed, would call for a $300 fine to both stores who sell the crack pipes and people possessing them. —MEGHANN MARCO
Crack pipes come easy at convenience stores [Boston NOW]
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@Michael_Bauser: I’d like to see someone try to smoke anything out of a plastic pipe
These won’t get banned as long as the U.S. government (who, if we will remember our history correctly, introduced crack into American society) continues to make money by incarcerating crack smokers, cycling them through the criminal justice system, and spewing them back out to retrieve later.
I’m amazed companies aren’t giving them to the poor for free.
Well, banning the sale of such won’t solve the crack problem, but I don’t see why store clerks should make it any easier, either, so I’d support the ban.
Of course, a ban would just move the stuff under the counter, and then you’d have to send in undercover narcs to see if the store would sell the kit to an undercover agent (just like they do to ferret out underage liquor sales).
@plim: you know it baby… only the best!
While there are cheaper versions at the impulse counter at your local drug store, the beauty salons and supply stores do carry $50+ tweezers in glass cases.
Why can’t they just go to a head shop? Or do those not exist in the US?
Isn’t smoking steel wool bad for your health? Oops, never mind.
Holy shit! Using that logic, PCs should be banned, since they are used for pirating movies and music!
Yes and let’s also ban aluminum cans immediately, because everyone knows how easily they can be turned into disposable pot pipes. Mmmm.
Mmmmm. Pot Pipes…
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…
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I’m sorry. Where were we?
Wait…let’s ban cars & SUVs since those are used to purchase these terrible items!
Yup, they’re selling these rosebuds in my neighborhood, too.
Check out my blog post from May 2, 2007:
http://www.boston.com/ae/sidekick/blog/2007/05/crack_is_wa…
It’s so sad. Whenever I walk into that Store 24, part of me wants to buy every single box of them, just to get them off the shelves. But I don’t….I don’t want give any $$ to that company; they’re probably making a killing on these things.
cheers,
Emily Sweeney
The Boston Globe
These pipes have been around for a while.
See http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2005/aug/15/disguises_blown_d…
for an article dated August 2005 about them.
Having lived in Lawrence, KS (where the linked article was published), many of the shadier gas stations carry the “sweetheart rose” tubes, both in Lawrence and nationwide; the same gas stations with the multiple varieties of cigarette and blunt papers in various exciting flavors, “energy pills” like yellowjackets, no-doz and friends, other more conspicuous paraphrenalia (pipes, clips, etc), cheap folding knives at the cash register, and the widest selection of cigarettes and malt liquor in town… And the same stations that were earlier in trouble in Lawrence for selling miniature switchblades, right next to the high-pressure butane jet lighters.
These are gas stations/convenience stores that have absolutely no qualms about selling whatever they think people will buy; they’re veritable vice dealers. Gasoline is just there as bait. I’ll reserve passing moral judgement on the store owners for another day, but it really does make me pause to think a bit about the ease of access and high visibility for these kinds of materials. My vote: make it all legal and maybe the layer of grease I can’t help but feel over these supplies and suppliers will wash clean, or at least cleaner…
How clueless was I….
I bought one of these “mini rose stems” for my girlfriend on my way out of the convenience store. I quickly realized what I had done when her dad said “you little F@%# buying a crack pipe for my daughter”. That didn’t go very well at all!