AUTHORITIES FOCUS ON NEW MONSTER--METHAMPHETAMINE

With seizures plummeting, officials say cocaine is
yesterday's drug of choice. Now meth dealers have become the top
priority for the county's narcotics agents.

It was a warm January day in 1994, and Robert Garcia was sweating as
he drove toward the Hilton Hotel in Newbury Park. But it wasn't the
weather; it was nerves. The undercover sheriff's deputy was just
minutes away from the drug bust of a lifetime.

Garcia met his Colombian connection in the hotel parking lot. As the
Colombian handed over 400 pounds of cocaine, a dozen uniformed
deputies swarmed in. And local law enforcement chalked up one more
victory in the war on drugs.

This time it was a nationwide money laundering and cocaine trafficking
ring operating out of Ventura County. Over the following months,
county, state and federal agents would seize 1,000 pounds of coke and
$7 million in cash.

The case was big. But, in one way, it was also routine. Cocaine, the
glamour drug of the '70s and early '80s in Southern California, was
still the biggest problem drug for law enforcement well into the '90s.
And big coke busts were almost commonplace.

But this is a new decade and everything has changed. In the early
months of this year, law enforcement in Ventura County is focused on a
new drug menace--methamphetamine. Cocaine was yesterday's drug. The
county's user population has found something new.

Cocaine seizures in Ventura County have plummeted. Methamphetamine
seizures now far outstrip cocaine hauls. Last year the county's new
multi-agency drug task force seized 29 pounds of meth in a six-month
period, and only four pounds of cocaine. Three out of every four drug
cases in court involve meth.

So what happened? Did law enforcement in Ventura County win the war on
cocaine in the '90s? Was there some other reason for the shift from
coke to meth? Is there anything to be learned by law enforcement in
its latest fight against meth?

The answer: Nobody really seems to know. But the story of the rise and
fall of coke in Ventura County contains at least some clues about what
is most likely to happen in future drug wars.

"Maybe cocaine is still around," Sheriff's Capt. Dennis Carpenter
said. "It's just not as public. And it's not the jet-set drug anymore.
Some people stopped, some people switched to alcohol, and a lot of
people switched to meth."

It was a combination of many things, others suggest. Law enforcement
pressure and tougher penalties for users and dealers helped change the
tide. Violence scared some away from coke. Then there were the users,
their lives frequently devastated by the drug once touted as being no
more addictive than aspirin.

Not long after that, the new monster exploded on the drug
scene.

Methamphetamine use took off with a popularity and omnipresence that
have marginalized its predecessor. It is cheaper and can be cooked up
in anyone's kitchen. And meth dealers are now the top priority for
local drug enforcement agents.

For years now, meth seizures and arrests have far outstripped cocaine
cases in the county.

Gone are tales such as the 1990 raid in Simi Valley, when police found
125 machine guns, 100 bladed weapons and $750,000 worth of cocaine in
the home of a suspected high-level dealer named Gardner Ernest
Flockart. Rare are reports of lives leveled, such as Santa Paula
multimillionaire Tony Bridges, owner of Tony Bridges Chevrolet in
Santa Paula, who was fatally shot during a 1992 robbery after
literally throwing his life away on cocaine.

"I don't think we're beyond it, no," Sheriff Bob Brooks said. "Our
officers still seize it on occasion. But it's all personal use
amounts. . . . We just don't see the volume that we used to."

Cocaine's Emergence in California

It was the mid-1970s when cocaine emerged on the California scene as
the new drug for the middle class. In those years most of the U.S.
cocaine supply came through Florida before being shipped to the rest
of the country.

But as law enforcement hit hard in Florida, Colombians looked for
other points of entry. They set their sights on California because of
the long-established smuggling routes for marijuana and heroin
controlled by Mexican drug lords.

Recognizing the business potential, Colombians joined forces with the
Mexican cartels. By the 1980s, Los Angeles had replaced Miami as the
cocaine capital of the country.

Watching it all from a distance were Ventura County authorities.
Through the '70s, cocaine busts were few. Most involved small-time
users. But as Los Angeles became the nation's new hub for coke
activity, the inevitable spillover reached Ventura County.

In 1983, sheriff's detectives in Thousand Oaks arrested a local
businessman for buying a kilo of cocaine--one of the biggest local
seizures at that time. Detectives were astonished at the price tag for
the 2.2 pounds of powder--$50,000.

"This was clearly the chic drug of the affluent," recalls Undersheriff
Craig Husband, who spent years early in his career working for the
department's narcotics unit. "And that's the way it was marketed. It
was glamorized by the press, glamorized by Hollywood, it was the in
thing to do."

In Los Angeles, law enforcement reacted to the heightened coke
activity much the way authorities in Florida did. They hit back,
creating large task forces to zero in on big-time dealers.

That pressure encouraged cocaine traffickers to once again look for
alternate areas to conduct business, remembers Capt. Gary Pentis, who
oversaw the sheriff's narcotics unit for much of the 1980s.

"So they came to Orange and Ventura counties to stash their stuff,
where they felt they were away from some of the pressures of law
enforcement," Pentis said.

Investigators saw the addicts first.

Like the Hollywood producer investigators found thrashing
uncontrollably in a Thousand Oaks laundermat bathroom. Just a few
blocks from his home, the laundermat was his place to shoot up, a
hide-out to keep his wife from learning of his habit. By the time
police found him, he had overdosed and was near death.

And there was the 21-year-old addict Husband can't forget. The addict
weighed about 85 pounds and had frazzled blond hair that framed a
gaunt and tired face. During a search of her home, Husband found the
8-by-10 glossies of a once-stunning blond with radiant blue eyes taken
during a modeling shoot. "How could you do this to yourself?" Husband
asked her.

"I can't help it," she told him. "I can't stop."

Then they found the dealers.

Among those arrested, a 60-year-old grandfather living in a trailer
park in Ojai. Turned in by his 13-year-old granddaughter in December
1986, William Rakestraw was caught handing over four pounds of cocaine
to a man. In Rakestraw's pocket, the receipt for a storage locker,
where detectives found another 110 kilograms of cocaine.

That was the year the Sheriff's Department created a major offenders
unit--four detectives directed to infiltrate the drug rings setting up
camp in the county.

"Some people were in denial that we had that level of drug
trafficking," said Pentis, an original member of the team. "But we
were finally able to show our administration we [Ventura County] were
being used by trafficking organizations to sell narcotics. This was
the other battlefront."

Statistics on cocaine seizures during the 1980s tell the tale. Between
January and June of 1984, sheriff's investigators claimed 11 pounds of
cocaine, and no methamphetamine. For the same period in 1987,
investigators seized 283 pounds of cocaine and three pounds of
methamphetamine.

But by now, the climate surrounding powder cocaine was changing. Ugly
stories of arrests and overdoses and mental breakdowns helped take the
sparkle out of the so-called champagne drug.

Suburban upper-crust users were forced to confront the dark reality
that their so-called nonaddictive recreational drug was destroying
lives.

"It burned up so many people," Husband said. "So many people died
behind it, people were finally becoming afraid of it."

But the drug dealers were already a step ahead. Powder cocaine was
about to morph into a more addictive version of itself, and at a cost
so cheap it could now be peddled on the inner-city street corners of
Los Angeles.

Greedy and ruthless gang members joined the business, and Ventura
County detectives once again braced themselves for the
aftershocks.

Crack Introduced to Ventura County

Husband remembers the first time he pulled the small, crystallized
rocks from the pocket of a man spread-eagled against a county patrol
car. Fellow detectives gathered around, staring in disbelief.

Crack, also known as rock cocaine, had come to Ventura
County.

"Yeah, it was scary," Husband said. "We saw what was happening to our
neighbors to the south, how ruthless the gangs were to protect their
business interests. We knew we were going to have to start dealing
with this too."

Crack would never grip Ventura County and its middle-class suburban
households with the same type of vengeance it held on the inner-city
streets of Los Angeles.

Nevertheless, the newer, cheaper, more addictive form of the drug
found a niche on minority-populated streets of Oxnard.

Motel rooms along South Oxnard Boulevard and apartments dotting Aleric
Street became popular dealing points. Dealers from Los Angeles drifted
up to Oxnard, setting up shop for a day or two before heading back to
L.A. to "rock up" more supplies.

Almost overnight, rock replaced heroin and powder cocaine, the drugs
most traded on the streets of Oxnard in the early 1980s, as the No. 1
drug peddled to residents.

"It was constant," remembers Oxnard Cmdr. Mike Matlock, then a
sergeant in the Police Department's narcotics unit. "And the users,
they were just overwhelmed by it."

Stunned by the drug's power, Matlock once asked an addict, his thin
body clearly ravaged by the drug, how long it took before he was
hooked. "Just once," the man said.

After that, the only thing that mattered was getting more. And now,
dominating the new dealers in Oxnard were members of the infamous
Blood and Crips gangs that ran the crack business in the inner
city--complete with their red and blue gang colors.

"It was just like right out of a Hollywood movie," Oxnard Sgt. Marty
Meyer said. "Everyone dressed down in their colors then."

They came to sell, and to recruit locals to sell for them. And
business boomed. Hoping to stem the tide, local detectives sometimes
trailed dealers back into Los Angeles.

It was during these trips across the county line that Pentis witnessed
the sophistication of the gangs' drug network. At a time when street
cops still went to pay phones to make a call, drug dealers had
expensive scanners, pagers, cell phones, and toted AK-47s.

"These weren't the gangs of the '50s and '60s, fighting with fists and
knives," Pentis said. "With the money they were making, they had all
the technology. This was when if you had a pager you were either a
doctor or a crook."

Back in Oxnard, membership in local gangs had reached 1,200 by 1991.
And by 1993, cocaine drug seizures in the county reached an all-time
high at 537 pounds.

County authorities reacted by beefing up gang units and other special
enforcement details to infiltrate the gangs in much the same way they
once infiltrated the Colombian drug organizations.

Bolstering their battle was a continuing cocaine backlash. The
county's white, well-to-do users abandoned the drug they once romanced
so enthusiastically. Cocaine wasn't Hollywood--it was gangs,
inner-city minorities and violence.

Ronald K. Siegel, a UCLA psychopharmacologist, first studied cocaine
addiction in the 1970s, watching a group of lab monkeys ingest cocaine
until they dropped dead. From the beginning, he had been one of the
strongest voices warning about the dangers of cocaine.

"It lost its Good Housekeeping stamp of approval," Siegel recalls.
"Movies of glamorous users turned into movies about gangs and people
getting killed. All of a sudden, Woody Allen laughing about blowing it
away in 'Annie Hall' turned into Al Pacino in 'Scarface.' "

Local detectives saw the result. Busts on the street for cocaine use
plummeted as middle-class users and dealers finally gave up on the
drug.

But as cocaine receded in popularity, a new problem drug and a new
group of drug users began to move into the spotlight.

Meth Traps a New Class of Users

Methamphetamine, long the drug of biker gangs and sold in relatively
small quantities, began spreading to a larger group of users in
Ventura County in the early '90s and has grown in popularity every
year since.

In 1991, county prosecutors filed 186 cases involving methamphetamine.
By 1995, that number jumped to 608. Over the same period, cocaine
prosecutions dropped from 165 cases to 35.

Meth tapped into a new class of users. These were often blue-collar
workers, low-to middle-class folks who could afford meth's low price
tag and didn't have to contend with violent gang members to obtain
it.

"Meth just took over crack cocaine," said Bob Holland, who helps run
Ventura County's drug court program.

"It's cheaper and lasts longer."

Mexican drug rings again moved into the new drug market, producing
meth in large quantities and taking over the new market. And when a
newer, easier recipe for mixing the drug became popular about 1993,
home-grown dealers jumped onto the meth bandwagon, cooking up batches
in motel rooms and camper shells.

Today, evidence of meth's power litters police files: the woman who
starved her newborn to death while bingeing; an addicted Thousand Oaks
student-athlete who tried to run down her mother with a car; an Oxnard
user who curled into a ball on his apartment floor and refused to get
up.

"Meth just blows the door off cocaine use," said Bill Redmond, felony
supervisor for the Ventura County district attorney's office. "It is
the predominate drug on the street."

In the past two years, meth's popularity has even expanded to a
wealthier crowd, Holland said.

"Now I see everything from Westlake Village-types born with silver
spoons in their mouths to third-generation ghetto people," Holland
said. "It's making further inroads up and down the social scale."

Last year Ventura County won a $338,000 grant to fund a new countywide
task force to battle methamphetamine.

The Ventura County Combined Agency Task Force combines authorities
from the Sheriff's Department, the Ventura, Oxnard and Simi Valley
police departments, Drug Enforcement Agency and FBI.

Cocaine simply isn't a priority.

"We can pursue other drugs," said Dennis Carpenter, who oversees the
team. "But our main focus is to go after methamphetamine."

Cocaine Still Seen as Factor in County

Despite meth's current dominance of the drug market, some federal
authorities contend cocaine still flourishes in Ventura County.

They say unrelenting pressure by authorities in Los Angeles has
prompted traffickers to divert cocaine northward, where suburban
neighborhoods and police distracted by the burgeoning methamphetamine
trade make it easier to do business.

Federal authorities suspect upscale homes on the eastern edge of the
county hold garages filled with multi-kilogram stashes. But the powder
may never hit the local market. Most of it, they argue, is marked for
distribution in states where coke continues to be a regular on the
party scene.

"For many reasons, Ventura County is a perfect distribution spot for
other areas of California as well as other parts of the United
States," said Dick Flood, supervisor for the U.S. Justice Department's
Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement.

"Maybe the problem on the street is not cocaine, but cocaine is still
housed here."

Drug Enforcement Agent Dick Marzullo said his investigators are
working large-scale cocaine cases in the county. But it's tough. His
resources are also strained by the methamphetamine war.

"If I had more, I could do more," Marzullo said. "Because I personally
believe there are significant stash houses here that hold large
quantities of cocaine."

Local authorities take offense at the notion that cocaine is going
unchecked while they fight the methamphetamine battle. If coke was out
there, they argue, they'd hear it from informants and they'd see it on
the street.

"But what we hear and what we see is meth," Carpenter
said.

And some drug experts say it really doesn't matter whether there are
secret mountains of cocaine here--no more than it matters which drug
is the big problem drug of the moment for law enforcement officials
and the larger society.

The past proves there will always be a market for drugs. Experts say
the only thing that changes is which drug is abused. Sometimes it's a
newly discovered narcotic. But often it's an old drug that lost favor
and becomes hot again with a new generation of users.

Meth, for instance, was more popular in the late '60s than cocaine,
then dropped as publicity slowly surfaced on fatal overdoses by meth
users.

"These things go in cycles," Undersheriff Husband says. "Something
catches on, it's popular, then it starts its destruction and people
stop using it. Then it starts all over again. People have a very short
memory."

To prove the point, Siegel shares the tale of a socialite from Chicago
who was arrested after she had taken to shoplifting to support her
cocaine habit. During her confession to authorities, she revealed she
even plucked out her gold teeth to pay for her addiction.

The year was 1902.

"If it's not cocaine, it will be something," Siegel said. "But it
could so easily be cocaine again. All it needs is another good
advertising campaign. The product still works, it just needs to be
repackaged and it'll be back."