Some alcohol outlets and convenience stores in California and other states are offering a disturbing product line to customers: prepackaged kits for smoking crack cocaine.

Drug-prevention leaders from San Diego and Vallejo say that liquor stores in urban neighborhoods have long been seen as a nexus for illicit drug use and sales. Now, they say, some retailers are marketing directly to their addict customers by selling seemingly innocuous products that can be used to make homemade crack pipes.

"These are items that normally have legitimate uses ... but there is an intent to find ways to blur the ways the product will be used," said Cleo Malone, director of San Diego's Palavra Tree treatment and prevention program.

Items that community leaders say are being sold as drug paraphernalia include novelty roses and automobile air fresheners -- each packaged in small, glass tubes -- and Chore Boys scrubbing pads. According to Malone and Sparks, the glass tubes are used to make pipes, while the Chore Boys are used to make a crude screen for holding the crack rock in place.

Another item you wouldn't expect to find at a liquor-store checkout: tiny plastic baggies, which activists say are sold to dealers as crack packages. Retailers typically claim that the baggies are stamp or coin bags.

Speaking at the Alcohol Policy 13 conference in Cambridge, Mass., on March 16, Malone and Michael Sparks, neighborhood project director for the Vallejo Fighting Back Partnership, warned that this is a marketing trend that is spreading from California to other states.

To illustrate the point, Sparks asked audience members who had heard of the problem before. All of those who did came from communities in the western half of the U.S. In addition to Southern California, the practice has been noted in the Bay Area and Seattle, where the main complaint has been not against liquor stores, but mini-marts at Shell gas stations.

Officials as far east as Milwaukee, Wisc., and St. Petersburgh, Fla., have also grappled with the problem. "I fully expect to see this trend move from the inner cities to the suburbs," added Sparks

Stores often display these unrelated items near the checkout. But in Southern California, some got more inventive -- and brazen -- by packaging an air freshener, Chore Boy, and a torch-style lighter and selling them for a huge markup to anyone who requested a "brown bag."

Prices ranged from $6 to $12, fluctuating from day to day and peaking towards the end of the month, when many addicts get public-assistance checks.

Local anti-drug groups took their concerns about the sales to police and prosecutors, arguing that the colocation of these items was a clear sign that they were being marketed for illicit purposes. "Auto-parts stores also sell air fresheners, but not right next to these related materials," said Sparks. "We were able to make the case that the fact that they were colocated meant that they were being used illegally."

In San Diego, The Palavra Tree volunteered its recovering residents to wear hidden cameras and go into local stores and ask for a "brown bag." In the sting operation, set up for a local TV station, 17 of 19 stores sold the packaged crack supplies to customers.

The group then took the videotape to the city attorney's office, which decided to press charges. A total of 15 convictions resulted, and the brown bags began disappearing from store shelves. "These merchants count on people in the community not doing anything," noted Malone.

Meanwhile, the Vallejo Fighting Back Partnership worked with state lawmakers to pass a nuisance-abatement ordinance that made sales of Chore Boys and the other crack-related items illegal if sold within 10 feet of the store's checkout area. "We put them on notice that this is drug paraphernalia, so that they would meet the standard that they had knowledge of use," said Sparks.

The policy was drafted by the state's alcoholic-beverage control office and enforced by local police, who told retailers to remove the items from their stores. The ordinance was supported by the alcoholic-beverage industry, which Sparks said recognized that sales of drug-related items could give them "a big black eye."

Sales of drug paraphernalia remains a moving target: Nothing can prevent stores from selling items like air fresheners and Chore Boys as long as they are located on different shelves, for example. And other types of retail outlets, such as 99-cent stores and cigarette stores, fall outside of the jurisdiction of alcohol-control regulations. There also is the question of whether the California ABC ordinance is so broad as to be an unconstitutional restraint of trade.

For now, however, California community leaders are pleased. "At this point, you can't find this stuff in Vallejo anymore," said Sparks, who added that the campaign not only reduced access points for drug users but helped reinforce community norms about drug use.