Heavy Rains Yielding Massive Marijuana Crops : Drugs: Sheriff’s officials step up their helicopter patrols following the seizure of about 6,000 plants near Lake Casitas.

Heavy rains earlier this year are being blamed in large part for a bumper crop of marijuana plants found throughout Ventura County during the past few months--and more discoveries are expected, authorities said Tuesday.

So far, about 8,000 plants--valued by officials at more than $32 million--have been discovered on public property from Lake Casitas to Thousand Oaks, officials said. If not confiscated, this illegal cache would have been the county’s seventh largest cash crop last year, displacing lettuce, which had a total value of $31.7 million.

The biggest haul of illegal vegetation came over the weekend, when sheriff’s deputies on routine helicopter patrol chanced upon a pot farm in a canyon near Lake Casitas. Approximately 6,000 marijuana plants, with an estimated street value of $24 million, were removed and destroyed.

It was the seventh such harvest by sheriff’s deputies on public lands this year, and the single largest bounty that authorities could remember. No one has been arrested in that case.

In fact, despite the record pace of seizures, only one pot farmer has been arrested so far this year, authorities said. Jose Alvarez, 35, was arrested earlier this month on suspicion of growing marijuana on national parkland in Thousand Oaks.

Meanwhile, sheriff’s officials said the marijuana harvesting season has about six to eight more weeks to go and that they expect to find more plants as they step up their helicopter patrols.

“Because of the record rains we had this year there is lots of water around in creeks and streams,” said Lt. Craig Husband. “Conditions are prime for growing in the back country.”

Husband said that marijuana cultivation in the county had been declining steadily in recent years because of a protracted drought. For example, he said, there were only 229 plants seized in 1994, down from 354 the previous year.

If caught cultivating marijuana on their own land, growers risk losing their property through asset forfeiture laws, Husband said. For this reason, he said, growers tend to plant their crops on public property, such as government parklands or forests.

To counter this problem, the Sheriff’s Department and the U.S. Forest Service conduct aerial spot checks every year throughout the Ventura County portion of the Los Padres National Forest, said Dick Fortier, a law enforcement officer with the forest service.

“We get a lot of reports from citizens who are out hiking or hunting, and we follow them up,” Fortier said.

But despite the success of locating marijuana farms in the county, authorities said that few arrests are made because growers are usually absent at the time of the discovery.

During Saturday’s find near Lake Casitas, a narcotics detective on board the sheriff’s helicopter spotted one person running from the scene, Husband said. No one was caught.

But once the sighting was made, Husband said, sheriff’s officials decided it was better to go in and confiscate the marijuana plants rather than to stake out the pot farm in hopes of later arresting growers.

Authorities spent Sunday and Monday cutting down the illegal vegetation and hauling it to an undisclosed location to be destroyed.

Husband said that the 6,000 marijuana plants were a high-grade, seedless variety with a street value of about $4,000 a pound. He said the value of the pot is based in large part on the quality of the plant and the amount of buds within each plant.

Despite the continuing popularity of marijuana, the current drug of choice in Ventura County is methamphetamine, or speed, according to Ralph Lochridge, a spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration. The main reason being that it’s cheap, he said.

Husband agreed. “It’s cheaper and you can stay higher on it than you can on other drugs,” he said. “So from an economic standpoint, it’s cost-effective. It also just happens to be fashionable at this point in time.”