Methamphetamine Use on Rise in East County : Drugs: ‘Speed’ is crossing age and class lines, police say. And more teen-agers are getting hooked.

Long the favorite drug of outlaw biker gangs, methamphetamine has begun hooking high-schoolers and businessmen in upper middle-class neighborhoods of east Ventura County, police said this week.

Use of the illicit stimulant known as speed, once found mostly in Oxnard and Ventura, has been swelling recently across class and age lines in Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley and Moorpark, detectives say.

And the fastest-growing group of users are teen-agers, they say.

Last week, Ventura County narcotics detectives arrested 10 people on felony charges while breaking up three east county speed-dealing operations, and they are planning to collar more, Sgt. Gary Pentis said.

While police were searching suspected dealers’ homes, teen-agers came to the doors, Pentis said.

“Some of the customers we ran into during the busts were 16-, 17-year-old kids buying $5 bags,” Pentis said.

“It’s no longer a biker drug,” he said. “There’s been a dramatic increase in the information we’re getting from our informants, from citizens and from dealers that we arrest that methamphetamine use is really increasing out here.”

Use of speed by teen-agers began growing last year, and the increase has not leveled off, said Warren Walker, clinical director of Be Free, a Thousand Oaks-based drug-treatment program for teen-agers.

Before the surge, one in 10 teen-agers Walker saw used speed, he said. Now it is one in three.

“I think it’s about as easy (to obtain) as pot for kids, and it’s quite cheap,” Walker said.

“Many of the kids who use it become little . . . distributors. They get enough money to buy a stash and distribute it to their friends and keep some to themselves for free. It seems to be a more attractive high than anything I’ve worked with.”

Alcohol abuse pops up in most of the substance-related crimes handled by the juvenile unit of the Ventura County district attorney’s office, said its head, Deputy Dist. Atty. John Cardoza.

But, he added, “meth is the prevalent drug of choice right now. I’ve seen more of it lately.”

Speed also is gaining popularity with the 20- to 30-year-old crowd--and the growth of the drug market in Simi Valley is keeping pace with that in Thousand Oaks, said Sgt. Danny Dunbar of the Simi Valley narcotics squad.

Dunbar described the typical dealer as “just John Q. Citizen. Most of them deal from quarter grams up to ounces.”

And Pentis said the typical user ranges “from the type of individual who lives from motel room to motel room, to the person who has a small business and is running it into the ground with his habit.”

With power shifts in the cocaine cartels and drug agencies squeezing harder on the cocaine pipeline from Central America, cocaine has become scarce, and dealers and users have been turning to American-made methamphetamine, detectives said.

Speed is easier to make and keeps users high longer and more cheaply than cocaine, police and prosecutors say. A $15 dose of speed will keep the user intoxicated for as long as $100 worth of cocaine, Pentis said.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Terence Kilbride said about half the narcotics cases he prosecutes now involve methamphetamine. “We’re talking the whole gamut, from being under the influence to sales cases,” he said.

Speed users, particularly the teen-agers, commit other crimes, Pentis said.

“Some of the kids we’ve encountered have been kids that police officers in other lines of work--burglary, theft and vandalism--have seen,” he said. “Some are from well-to-do families.”

Pentis said speed users often are harder to handle than cocaine users.

“Meth addicts seem to have a higher volatile personality level,” he said. “They become extremely paranoid. When you’re talking about addicts, people that are seriously ‘tweaking,’ they’ve been up 36, 40 hours and they’re seeing bugs crawling on the walls. They’ll use continually, and then they’ll crash.”

While a cocaine dose’s high lasts no more than an hour, a methamphetamine high can go on for hours, police and treatment specialists say.

Speed addicts often must get treatment and counseling for 12 to 18 months before they have safely broken the addiction, Walker said.