Prosecutors Also Target Small-Time Meth Dealers : Crime: Authorities cite alarming rise in use of the drug and seek approval to earmark block grant funds to combat the increase.

Alarmed by the overwhelming rise in methamphetamine use, local authorities plan to combat the crime by targeting even the lowest-level dealers of the drug with high-priority prosecutions.

Currently, only defendants accused of dealing in large quantities of methamphetamine are treated as major traffickers and prosecuted by the district attorney’s narcotics unit from the time charges are filed.

But if the Ventura County Board of Supervisors allows local authorities to continue receiving a $300,000 anti-drug grant, even relatively small-time methamphetamine dealers would be subject to high-level drug prosecutions, a senior district attorney’s official said Monday.

The board is expected to give local law officials permission today to continue receiving the federal Byrne grant--a block grant intended to fund drug-fighting efforts.

With the board’s approval, prosecutors would be able to assign two deputy district attorneys exclusively to oversee new cases of methamphetamine trafficking, even ones involving small amounts of the drug.

Defendants accused of selling small amounts of methamphetamine now often escape the appropriate punishment because prosecutors have not had the resources to assign prosecutors to handle those cases as soon as they enter the system, said Chief Deputy Dist Atty. Ronald C. Janes.

Under the current system, several different prosecutors might work on a single case of possession of methamphetamine for sale. For instance, one prosecutor might handle the defendant’s arraignment, another might take on the preliminary hearing and still another will present the evidence at trial.

Under the new plan, one prosecutor will take the case from beginning to end.

“We will now give them the same type of handling that we now give major narcotics dealers,” Janes said.

In the past five years, arrests for methamphetamine possession and trafficking have jumped 500% in Ventura County, according to local authorities.

Noting the staggering increase, police officials say they are happy to hear that prosecutors plan to crack down even more on suspects charged with trafficking methamphetamine.

“It sounds like a great idea to me,” said Sheriff’s Cmdr. Kathy Kemp, who blames the astonishing rise in methamphetamine on its cheap price.

She said methamphetamine, a powerful stimulant also known as crank and speed, is especially dangerous because of the way it affects the central nervous system.

“The problem is it doesn’t just make them high, but it produces a paranoia and side effects” that produce violence, she said.

Lt. Pat Miller of the Ventura Police Department agrees that the change in strategy by prosecutors is welcome news.

“It just makes for a lot more intimate knowledge on the part of the prosecutor if he handles the entire case,” Miller said. “They have a much more thorough knowledge of the case.”

In legal vernacular, the new approach to methamphetamine cases is known as vertical prosecution. Janes said murder cases have always been vertically prosecuted.

Janes also said that in 1978, when Michael D. Bradbury became the county’s top prosecutor, the district attorney’s office also began using the strategy to better enable it to prosecute career criminals.

More recently, it has helped prosecutors win longer prison sentences for violent gang members and wife beaters, Janes said.

Three years ago, when the county first received a share of the federal anti-drug Byrne grant, methamphetamine use was already on the rise. But because the problem had not reached crisis proportions, prosecutors focused their grant funds on paying the salaries of two deputy district attorneys who worked primarily on cocaine and heroin cases, Janes said.

But from 1990 to 1994, arrests from methamphetamine crimes involving trafficking activity alone rose 340%, authorities said. In the last six months of 1994, local police agencies made 14 separate undercover purchases of methamphetamine in excess of one pound.

In contrast, they made only two such undercover buys in 1993.

Many of those purchases were made by an interagency task force consisting of officers from Ventura, Oxnard and Santa Paula police departments, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency and the U.S. Customs Service.

The salaries of officers on the task force are also paid for by the Byrne grant, officials said. In addition, the grant will fund two probation officers to oversee defendants convicted of drug offenses.

The Sheriff’s Department is not receiving any of the funds from the grant, although it did receive money from it several years ago. Those funds were used to purchase drug-testing equipment, authorities said.