In many troubled neighborhoods, convenience stores sell miniature Love's Roses in small glass vials, with individual scouring pads on display nearby. Combined, the two can be used to make a simple crack pipe.

The federal Drug Enforcement Administration seized 334,000 Love's Roses vials in Detroit last year, classifying them as crack pipes. In Kansas City, U.S. Attorney Todd Graves recently indicted the owners of two 7th Heaven music shops for selling drug paraphernalia. Getting glass vials and scrubbing pads off the shelves, however, is more often up to community activists, since law enforcement officials cannot readily distinguish between legitimate commerce and drug-related sales as they could, say, with a bong.

"The head shop is the whipping boy," said Robert Vaughn, a lawyer and expert on paraphernalia law. "The other places that sell stuff that might be seen as paraphernalia are harder to go after."

In Kansas City, neighborhood groups like the Paseo Collaborative are pressuring store owners to drop the drug-related products, saying that doing so would discourage drug dealers from hanging around stores and encourage more law-abiding residents to shop. "We told them they would have more business and it would be the kind of business they should have," said Margaret May, executive director of the Ivanhoe Neighborhood Council.

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