September 05, 1989|By John Kass.
The glass for the cocaine pipes come from Germany, Asia or the hobby store down the block. The wrapping paper comes from Boulder, Colo. The powder to dilute the drug comes from vitamin manufacturers in Los Angeles. The screens for the pipes can be bought at any plumbing store.
Despite laws in most states regulating the sale of drug paraphernalia, including a recent law passed in Illinois, the material still ends up, ready for sale, on South Ashland Avenue and West Lake Street, as well as in every other big city in the U.S.
The business of selling and distributing pipes and other paraphernalia has hit upon hard times and has burrowed underground. At its height in the 1970s, the paraphernalia business accounted for an estimated $600 million to $1.5 billion in sales.
The establishments, known as ``head shops,`` where such stuff was sold were as common in shopping malls as frozen yogurt stands are today. With one visit, a suburban teenager could buy into the counterculture with his allowance money and return home in time for dinner, hiding a water pipe or a High Times magazine under his shirt. Posters glorifying drug use, fruit-flavored rolling papers and gaudy devices used for drugs were available to pre-teens and others.
But after a flurry of local laws in the early 1980s and pressure from suburban parents, drug paraphernalia distributors stopped wholesaling their wares in white suburbs and returned, with a vengeance, to black and Hispanic ghettos.
Head shops have gone the way of the mood ring and the earth shoe, and most of those that remain don`t display multicolored marijuana water pipes. The round, yellow smiley-face button so common in those stores of long ago is now sold depicting a bullet hole in the forehead. High Times, which once advocated all types of drug use, has watched its circulation fall from 700,000 a month in the late 1970s to less than 200,000. The ads that once offered exotic pipes now lean toward caffeine-based stimulants and hydroponic equipment for the grow-your-own set.
``Times change. It`s still out there, but the business is all underground now,`` said Jack Herer, president of the Ah Ha Pipe Co. of Van Nuys, Calif., a leading manufacturer of pipes and other restricted objects. Herer, who campaigns to legalize marijuana, started his business in 1973.
``No other company will admit they`re making pipes but me,`` Herer said.
``It was a great business. For about $100 in material, anybody could realize a $1,000 profit or more. All those crazy pipes were made out of lamp and plumbing parts. Now, the cocaine people are into glass.
Glass tubing can be bought cheaply almost anywhere. All the narcotics dealer needs is a glass cutter and a piece of sandpaper. The glass is cut into tubes. Metal covered scrubbing pads are heated until the brass-like covering is burned off. This is cut into bits and stuffed into the small tubing. The crack pipe is born.
``Crack dealers sell their drugs for $5 or so,`` added Herer, who said he is opposed to cocaine and crack use. ``The glass for the pipe costs 10 cents, and the dealer sells it for $2. That`s quick profit. The government can`t stop cocaine coming in, how are they going to stop paraphernalia?``
The movement against drug paraphernalia began with Families in Action, an Atlanta-based antidrug parent group. Working with Georgia state legislators, they helped pass the first antiparaphernalia law in the U.S. in 1980, which banned the sale of such items to children.
The antiparaphernalia trend continued in other states. Despite court challenges, 40 states have such laws, according to the U.S. Customs Service. Some laws, such as Colorado`s, list paraphernalia sales as petty offenses, punishable by a $50 fine. Others, like Illinois` new law, make paraphernalia sales a felony punishable by up to 3 years in prison.
Federal lawmakers, meanwhile, adopted the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which enabled the U.S. Customs Service to arrest distributors who imported paraphernalia or transported it across state lines.
Tens of millions of dollars worth of crack pipes, roach clips and other items have been seized by customs agents in several recent raids in New York to San Francisco.
``But the stuff is still sold,`` said Paula Kemp, associate director of the Atlanta parents group. ``I know people still roll their own tobacco cigarettes, but it`s hard for me to imagine that a guy out in south Georgia with a gun rack in his pickup truck would be caught dead with strawberry rolling papers sticking out of his mouth.
``The laws have helped drive paraphernalia stores out of communities. But police departments don`t have the kind of resources to go after the paraphernalia dealers. It`s the (drug) dealers they`re after.``
Illinois Gov. James Thompson acknowledged it would be difficult to prove that a pipe or other item was sold for drug use rather than for smoking tobacco.