Pcp

A Los Angeles police officer, a Medal of Valor winner who says he has suffered flashbacks, memory loss and speech difficulties since a man threw liquid PCP in his face during a foot chase in Boyle Heights, recalled his experiences on the witness stand Friday.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich chastised Sheriff's Department officials Tuesday for not acting quicker to clean up chemicals that were illegally buried at the Pitchess Jail in Castaic some 20 years ago and have now seeped into ground water. "Why does it take five years to get a detailed study of this problem?" Antonovich asked Undersheriff Jerry Harper and Sharon R. Dunn, the Sheriff's Department's director of facilities, at a meeting of the Board of Supervisors.

It is a drug that has been blamed for stimulating the most abhorrent, mindless acts of violence. Users are reported to have blithely amputated parts of their body--pulling their teeth out with pliers or gouging out their eyes. Mothers were accused of scalding or maiming their infants. And felons are said to have terrified police officers when gunfire failed to halt their advance or when, in a superhuman show of strength, they popped their handcuffs.

The 19-year-old gang member slain by a sheriff's deputy at the Ramona Gardens housing project in East Los Angeles was under the influence of high quantities of alcohol and PCP at the time of his death, according to a coroner's report released Monday. An autopsy on the body of Arturo Jimenez, who was fatally shot Aug. 3, showed he had a blood-alcohol level of 0.20%--more than twice the legal limit of 0.08% for operating a vehicle--Los Angeles County coroner's spokesman Bob Dambacher said.

Pitchess jail officials said Friday they have embraced a simple yet effective alternative that will cut the multimillion-dollar costs of removing illegally buried PCP: Leave the drugs underground and instead reroute rainfall runoff. Roger Anderson, the jail's civilian administrator who directed an investigation of the problem, said he will propose the plan to state regulators and the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in about six months, after more testing.

A man apparently carrying two bottles of the hallucinogen PCP aboard a Dallas-bound American Airlines flight departing from Los Angeles International Airport forced the flight's cancellation Wednesday after fumes from the chemical filled the cabin with a noxious odor shortly before takeoff, authorities said.

The California Supreme Court on Monday affirmed the death sentence of a man who murdered a West Covina police officer in 1983, and reversed the child molestation convictions of a Kern County couple. In the death penalty case, the court unanimously rejected Michael Anthony Jackson's contention that he was not responsible for the August, 1983, murder of Kenneth Wrede, a West Covina police officer, because he was under the influence of PCP.

After a three-year investigation, authorities announced Wednesday that 16 purported members of the Bounty Hunters street gang were indicted on charges of manufacturing and distributing about $30 million worth of PCP throughout Los Angeles County. The grand jury indictments against the defendants, all but one of them now in custody, could put an immediate crimp in the countywide manufacture and sales of the powerful drug, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Maria Ramirez.

New data collected at five Orange County drug treatment clinics shows a surge in the use of LSD among youth--particularly in the more affluent South County. Crack cocaine and PCP are more popular in the North County than elsewhere, while marijuana ranks highest as the problem drug among the 657 adolescents in public treatment, according to the report, which will be presented today at the Orange County Child Abuse Conference in Anaheim by John Van Sky, director of the Santa Ana Drug Abuse Clinic.

Four people suspected of leading a major crack cocaine and PCP distribution ring are in custody after federal agents raided a house in Orange and seized more than $1.5 million in suspected drug profits from a safe buried beneath a patio there, authorities said Wednesday. Agents discovered the safe, authorities said, when they smashed through the cement patio during the raid of the split-level house in the 800 block of South Yorba Street.