Confiscation of Cocaine in 1991 Triples : Drugs: Finding major traffickers has a higher priority now, officials say. But narcotics arrests are lower than in 1990.

The amount of cocaine seized in Ventura County more than tripled last year compared to 1990, according to the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department.

Officials said the dramatic increase underscores the challenge that local law enforcement faces in its war on drugs in the new year.

“There’s just a glut of cocaine coming through Ventura County,” says Sgt. Arnie Aviles, a supervisor in the sheriff’s narcotics unit. “We’re just so close to the source.”

The Los Angeles metropolitan area is the primary source for cocaine entering Ventura County, according to law enforcement officials.

This vast stretch of turf, including Los Angeles and Orange counties, is viewed by the federal Drug Enforcement Administration as the No. 1 staging area for the national distribution of cocaine.

While cocaine trafficking was on the rise, as reflected by the sharp increase in the confiscation rate, narcotics arrests in Ventura County in 1991 were significantly lower than in 1990, according to the state Department of Justice’s Bureau of Criminal Statistics.

Narcotics officials are not necessarily dismayed about this turn of events, however.

What this reflects is the increasing emphasis in recent years on ferreting out major drug traffickers and distribution organizations, they say. These types of cases, more often than not, take time and manpower.

As a result, said Vincent J. O’Neill Jr., Ventura County’s chief deputy district attorney, “straight (drug) possession cases are down. The narcs have changed their targeting. They’re going after bigger people.”

This translates into more quality time being invested into the drug battle, according to the Sheriff’s Department.

“A lot of time and effort goes into these investigations,” said Lt. Guy Inglis, who heads the sheriff’s narcotics bureau. “You might end up with a major seizure, but with fewer arrests.”

Moreover, he said, trafficking networks have become more complex and take more time to penetrate.

“The people we are dealing with have an intelligence system also, and they are getting more sophisticated, there’s no doubt about it,” Inglis said.

The figures for Ventura County, in a sense, reflect a microcosm of the national war on drugs. Just who is winning is not always clear from the flood of statistics generated by law enforcement’s battle to control illicit drug trafficking.

Confounding the picture is the number of agencies--such as the sheriff, local police, the federal DEA and the state attorney general’s office--which produce streams of figures on drug confiscation and arrests.

For example, a year ago the Bush Administration produced a drug survey which showed that cocaine use by Americans plunged 45% from 1988 levels and 72% from 1985 use. President Bush hailed the results as “the most compelling evidence that drug use is declining significantly.”

Then, last month, a new government survey suggested the Administration’s war on drugs may not be making as much progress as was first thought.

According to the annual report drafted by the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse, the number of Americans using cocaine rose to 1.9 million in 1991 from 1.6 million in 1990.

An encouraging note in the survey was that overall drug use fell to 6.2 million users from 6.4 million in 1990; and the number of adolescent users dropped to 1.4 million in 1991 from 1.6 million in 1990.

In Ventura County, the war’s progress also appears to be producing mixed results.

In the first 10 months of 1991, 134 kilograms (a kilo is 2.2 pounds) of cocaine were seized in Ventura County by sheriff’s deputies, according to figures provided at the request of The Times.

This compares to 41 kilograms of cocaine seized in the county for all of 1990.

By way of comparison, the amount of cocaine confiscated by the Los Angeles County sheriff also more than tripled during the first 10 months of 1991, but at a much higher level--2,413 kilograms compared to 727 kilograms seized in 1990.

As the level of cocaine confiscation rises, so do questions about the actual level of drugs slipping into the county.

“A good rule of thumb,” said Lt. Ingles, is that “we’re only getting approximately 20% of what’s coming into the U.S.” That ratio, he said, “stays pretty constant” and, therefore, also applies to Ventura County.

Meanwhile, the level of felony drug arrests in Ventura County has declined in the last couple of years, according to the state Justice Department’s Bureau of Criminal Statistics.

For the first six months of last year, cocaine and heroin arrests of adults and juveniles totaled 359 against 470 for the same period in 1990, a 24% drop, the bureau said.

For all of 1990, such arrests totaled 852 compared to 1,102 arrests for 1989.

The Ventura County sheriff’s cocaine trafficking figures reflect the level of drug activity in a wide area of the county, including the five cities that contract for sheriff’s services and a large unincorporated area.

While the Sheriff’s Department fields the largest force of narcotics agents in the county, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration is also taking an increasingly active role in focusing on drug activity in both Ventura and Santa Barbara counties.

DEA officials generally look upon the Oxnard, Santa Barbara and Santa Maria areas as illicit drug distribution hubs for the central coast.

The emergence of these centers resulted from increased pressure on drug operators in Los Angeles and Orange counties, DEA sources said.

“It (the central coast) continues to see an increase in drug trafficking and an increase in drug organizations moving into the area to establish operations,” said a recent DEA memo.

“It remains a primary area for drug trafficking because of its vast remoteness and wealth.”

Much of the Colombian cocaine moving into the central coast counties is transshipped through Mexico and then moved into Southern California, according to the DEA.

Another fallout of the pressure narcotics officers are putting on the Los Angeles area is a new wave of drug activity emerging in the Riverside-San Bernardino area.

“It’s a matter of shifting patterns,” said Ralph Lochridge, a DEA spokesman for the agency’s Los Angeles regional office. “As we push down in one area, they (the dealers) squirt out in other areas.”

Heroin trafficking provides another vexing challenge for Ventura County law enforcement officials. The problem is even more critical when one considers the deadly impact of the drug, they say.

“Heroin is a harsh mistress,” said Sgt. Joe Munoz, head of the Oxnard Police Department’s narcotics unit, in describing the lethal impact of the drug.

Because heroin’s wholesale street value is so much higher than cocaine--about $100,000 a kilo versus about $20,000 a kilo for cocaine--it is more commonly sold in tiny amounts, such as a gram at a time. Therefore, Ventura County confiscation figures measure only a few ounces annually, a fraction of cocaine seizures.

For example, the Ventura County sheriff reported 1.3 ounces of so-called black tar heroin seized in the county during the first 10 months of last year, compared to 3.8 ounces seized during 1990.

Even in Los Angeles County, the first 10 months of last year saw only 10 kilograms of heroin seized compared to seven kilograms confiscated for all of 1990, according to sheriff’s figures.

“It’s hard to penetrate heroin networks,” Munoz said. “It’s such a closed society.”

Typically, he said, heroin enters Southern California from Mexico and is distributed from the Oxnard area to points north, such as Salinas, San Jose, Sacramento and even as far north as the state of Washington.

Separately, marijuana growers appear to be proliferating in recent years in Ventura and nearby counties, according to Charlie Stowell, the DEA’s California coordinator for its marijuana suppression program.

“Along the coast between Malibu and Santa Barbara there are new growing areas,” Stowell said in a telephone interview from his Sacramento office.

“Marijuana still is California’s No. 1 cash crop,” he said.

Aviles of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department agreed that most of the marijuana that is seized is grown locally rather than imported from Mexico as was the case a few years ago.

“We have the perfect climate for growing marijuana,” he said.

Remote areas of Los Padres National Forest, where the plant is grown covertly outdoors, and secret indoor hothouse operations in urban areas of Ventura County are where illicit marijuana operations are being uncovered, federal and local law enforcement officials said.

Winning the war on drugs will obviously take time, maybe the better part of this decade, in terms of strangling drug distribution routes and dampening demand, law enforcement officials said.

“It will take a geopolitical policy” among governments and police agencies, said the Oxnard Police Department’s Munoz.

“Are we going to subsidize the dope capitals of the world?” he asked. “I don’t know. Our efforts are to do the best we can with our resources.”

Meanwhile, the drug war’s frenetic pace continues.

“There doesn’t seem like there’s enough time in a day to meet the needs of narcotics enforcement within the county,” Sheriff’s Lt. Inglis said. “It seems like we’re continually on the run.”

County Felony Narcotics Arrests

Arrest figures reported by local law enforcement agencies for all drugs, including cocaine, heroin, marijuana, LSD and amphetamines. 1981: 818 1982: 772 1983: 782 1984: 846 1985: 906 1986: 1,095 1987: 1,453 1988: 1,268 1989: 1,475 1990: 1,222 1991*: 558 * First six months

Source: State Department of Justice, Division of Law Enforcement, Bureau of Criminal Statistics