TULIA BREAKS!

The story we broke in our June 23 issue about a racially tainted drug sting
in a small Panhandle town, and the highly suspect undercover agent who ran
it, has officially entered the media food chain. It has now been digested
by so many news outlets - beginning with Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now and
ending with a front page story in The New York Times and a feature segment
on CNN that the carnivores at the top of the chain are now referring to
the story in shorthand. The racially divided town, the questionable police
work, the incredibly long prison sentences - it's all just "Tulia" now. As
in: "Tulia is as much a story about race as how the drug war has gone
crazy." That's from Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith, quoted in Arianna
Huffinton's syndicated column on October 9. From the Observer to the Times
to the Texas Monthly, and in only four short months.

The big bust in Tulia, population 5,000, created a ripple through the
state's daily papers back in the summer of 1999, when the arrests occurred
and the racial targeting of the sting (roughly ten percent of the town's
black population was indicted) became readily apparent. But the stories
barely scratched the surface, and nobody seemed to be asking the biggest
question of all: could there really be 43 cocaine dealers in a town the
size of Tulia? By the time I drove to Tulia a year later, the story was
completely moribund, deader than the news room at the Lubbock Avalanche
Journal. My contact in Tulia told me she had tried in vain for months - as
one defendant alter another received staggering sentences for delivering
tiny amounts of cocaine, in cases built on the scantest of evidence - to
get just one major daily to come out and take a closer look at the story.

Nobody would bite.

And what a story it was. Defense attorneys had put together a damning file
on the undercover agent, enough to cook his goose in any fair court of law.
But the Swisher County judges wouldn't allow the evidence to be heard.

So the first airing of the laundry, and the first critical look at the drug
war in Tulia, was in the pages of The Texas Observer. But not the last. A
reader in Tulia noticed a pattern in the subsequent coverage, none of
which, when it finally came, gave attribution to the Observer. "We were
chatting Sunday evening at our meeting and I pointed out that all of these
stories (including the New York and LA. Times pieces) amount to little more
than variations on a theme," he wrote me. "You set the pattern with your
story and everybody largely rehashes what you laid out - only with less
depth and attention to detail." We could not have said it better ourselves.

Time magazine called the office just before we went to press to ask for
permission to use a photo I shot for the Tulia story. "We'll of course
credit you for the photo," the editor assured me. And that's the only place
The Texas Observer will appear in your story, I thought.

Gobbled again.

But this is why we do what we do in the alternative press, and moments like
this are what makes it all worth it. Things happen when stories make it to
the top of the food chain.

Corrupt politicians get dethroned.

People get out of jail. Justice prevails.

Sometimes. This time, though, it feels like something is happening, that
opposition to the drug war may be approaching a critical mass in this country.

Californians will vote on a decriminalization initiative this November, and
medical marijuana ordinances are slowly making legalization a reality for
many cities.

A recent rally at the state capitol, attended by a large delegation from
Tulia (see page 4), graphically demonstrated that a wide range of people
are reaching similar conclusions about the drug war. N.B.