Rate of Cocaine Treatment Is High in Ventura County, Report Shows

Ventura County admits more than twice the number of people to treatment programs for cocaine abuse as the state average, but felony drug arrests are less than half the state average, a report presented to the Board of Supervisors says.

However, law enforcement agencies in the county make more than twice the number of misdemeanor drug arrests as the state average.

The findings are among an array of facts contained in a sweeping 600-page, five-year master plan by the Ventura County Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs to reduce drug and alcohol abuse in the county.

The report outlines what its authors see as drug- and alcohol-related problems in the county, including:

* A prevailing attitude in the county of denial that drug and alcohol problems exist.

* The serving of alcohol as an accepted practice at major community events, including the California Strawberry Festival, the Ventura County Fair and fund-raisers for the DARE anti-drug program and the Boys & Girls Club.

* A lack of community youth activities, forcing teen-agers to turn to illegal substances out of boredom.

* Indications of drug abuse among schoolchildren, including a survey of 366 teachers who estimated that about one in six junior and senior high school students had used drugs during the school year.

* A concentration of liquor outlets in certain communities, including Oxnard, despite the county as a whole having the second-lowest number of alcohol outlets per capita in the state.

George Huba, a consultant who helped prepare the report, told the supervisors that drug problems “represent a drain on all the resources in the county.”

The county agency began working on the report after state funding was approved in 1988 to develop a plan for reducing drug and alcohol abuse.

The report suggests a host of causes of the problems, including bad parenting and lack of adequate funding. It also says that problems are sometimes created by a lack of communication between different agencies that offer services to people with drug problems.

“Often, efforts are being duplicated, or one agency does not know what services are offered by other agencies,” the report says. “People often get lost in the gaps in the system. The system is confusing for clients, who get shuffled around from agency to agency and have to deal with too much paperwork.”

The report says that, while fewer Ventura County residents, on the average, are admitted to treatment programs for all types of drug problems than statewide, the trend does not hold true when it comes to treatment for cocaine abuse.

The number of residents admitted to county treatment programs for cocaine abuse in 1989 was 1.25 for every 1,000 residents, while the state average was 0.56 per 1,000 residents, the report shows.

“Ventura County needs potentially to tailor services to clients with cocaine as their primary drug of abuse,” the report says.

And while the misdemeanor drug-arrest rate in the county was more than double the state average from 1984 to 1989, felony drug arrests were less than half the statewide rate, the report shows.

While indicating areas where the county programs show room for improvement, the report also cites some strong points, including a one-third drop in reported drug-abuse incidents among schoolchildren from 1986 to 1989 and a lower juvenile drug-arrest rate than statewide.

In putting together the document over the past year, officials surveyed nearly 2,000 schoolchildren and 867 English- and Spanish-speaking adults, and conducted surveys of more than 100 employers. An advisory panel of educators, law enforcement officials and public health workers also participated.

“We wanted to find out the extent of the problems,” said Stephen Kaplan, administrator of the county Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs.

Sixty-five county residents, who held discussions to help prepare the report, came up with a long list of possible ways to decrease county drug problems, including banning alcohol and tobacco at public events, offering more youth and after-school programs, expanding bilingual services to the county’s growing Latino community and increasing intervention and treatment programs.

In an interview, Supervisor John K. Flynn said the report provides useful information and that immediate action is needed.

“My only problem is it’s going to take too long to get a strategy developed,” Flynn said. “Here we have all this information--how do we go about combatting the problem?”