Torrance police know what to do with traffickers, but what about the drugs?

The Torrance Police Department has a problem that every police force would love to have.

It has busted so many drug buyers and dealers in recent years that it has no place to put all the confiscated drugs.

The police property room is overflowing with marijuana, heroin, amphetamines and other assorted drugs. But most of the bounty is cocaine, according police officials.

In order to accommodate the huge stash, the Police Department asked the City Council this week to allocate $14,890 to enlarge the property room by 1,650 square feet. (For security reasons police officials would not give the property room’s current size.)

The heavily reinforced room will be completed in about five weeks, city officials said.

“When they designed this place years ago it never entered anyone’s mind that we would confiscate so many drugs,” said police spokesman Sgt. Ron Traber.

The source of these illicit drugs is an emerging wave of international drug traffickers who have made Torrance and surrounding cities a national distribution center for their multibillion-dollar industry, according to Lt. David Marsden, the head of the narcotics detail. Major drug dealers choose to operate in these cities because of their proximity to freeways, the Port of Los Angeles and to Los Angeles International Airport, he said.

Not satisfied with simply arresting drug dealers in the city, Torrance detectives began in late 1984 to work with federal agents in tracing the international drug supply line as it branched out from the airport and the port. As a result, Torrance police have made busts and confiscated dope and money as far away as Santa Ana, East Los Angeles and Orange.

“We just began following the organization and we started crossing paths with federal investigators,” Marsden said.

One benefit for the city is that the Police Department gets a portion of the seized money. From 1985 to 1988, Torrance detectives impounded more than $3 million in cash, receiving back $350,000 from federal officials.

Proof of just how badly the department needs a bigger drug storage room is in the figures: from 1984 to 1986 police say they grabbed cocaine worth $28.4 million. Last year the department confiscated about 1,700 pounds of cocaine, worth about $170 million, Marsden said. During the first three months of 1989, the department has already matched that amount.

“Eighty-eight was one of our better years,” he said. “But every year we are getting better.”