CRUCIBLE FOR DRUG WAR

As Salem was to witch-hunt hysteria, so is the little town of Tulia,
Texas, to our modern version of the witch hunt, the drug war.

In his classic play "The Crucible," Arthur Miller captured for all
time how a mixture of fear, paranoia and bad laws led to a horrific
miscarriage of justice in 17th-century America.

To explore the 21st-century equivalent of this madness, someone -
David Mamet? Anna Deavere Smith? - should dramatize what is going on
in this rural community of 5,000, best known until now for its
livestock auctions.

In July 1999, following an 18-month undercover sting operation, 43
residents of Tulia were arrested in an early-morning drug raid. Forty
of them were black - an astounding 17 percent of the town's entire
black population of 232.

Almost all were charged with selling small of amounts of cocaine -
worth less than $200. But as the cases went to trial - most without a
single black on the jury - and the convictions mounted, the sentences
looked like something out of the gulag-era Soviet Union. First-time
offenders with no prior convictions - which could have made them
eligible for probation - were locked away for more than 20 years.

By the end, Tulia had become a crucible for the drug war. These were
clearly not big-time drug dealers. In fact, when they were arrested,
no drugs, drug paraphernalia, guns or caches of money were found. Only
a few could afford to make bail; none was able to hire a lawyer.

What happened to the 19 men and women convicted of witchcraft in
eastern Massachusetts began with the accusations of children. The
convictions in northern Texas were based on one accuser, Tom Coleman,
a white undercover officer who was working as a welder when he landed
the job in Tulia. His accusations were uncorroborated - he had no
audio tapes or video surveillance of his drug buys and no eyewitnesses
to back up his version of events.

Only in an atmosphere of drug-war hysteria could so many rules of
evidence be so willfully cast aside and institutions that would
normally function as watchdogs become swept up in the frenzy. The day
after the arrests, the Tulia Sentinel described the suspects as "known
dealers," "drug traffickers" and "scumbags."

So much for a free press. And the presumption of innocence. And an
untainted jury pool. As happened in Salem, the powers that be defined
reality - witches (drug dealers) are rampant among us - and then
identified those who had to be purged to protect all decent people. To
dissent from the prevailing view was to join the outcasts.

Anything that did not fit into the preordained outcome - including the
many questions about the accuser himself - was simply ignored. In the
middle of Coleman's sting operation, the Tulia police received a
teletype with a warrant for his arrest from Cochran County, where
Coleman had previously worked as a deputy sheriff. He had been charged
with theft and leaving thousands of dollars in unpaid debts in his
wake when he skipped town.

Unlike those he accused in Tulia, he was never jailed and, shockingly,
was allowed to continue conducting the Tulia operation.

Yet the world would never have heard of Tulia had it not been for
another man, Gary Gardner, a rotund, self-described redneck farmer and
former cop with a fondness for salty language. He alone refused to
stay silent. "I just worked the facts, and the facts show that a lot
of these people aren't guilty," said Gardner.

In late September, the ACLU filed a federal lawsuit. The suit - which
the NAACP is joining this week - charges local officials with "a
deliberate plan . . . and policy of targeting members of the (black)
community" as a way of "removing them from the area using the legal
system."

Tulia is on its way to becoming a cause celebre, with front-page
stories appearing in major newspapers this past weekend. On Friday,
Gov. George Bush called the drug war "one of the worst public-policy
failures of the '90s." This was supposed to be an indictment of the
Clinton/ Gore administration for not being tough enough. But as Tulia
- - in the governor's own back yard - chillingly proves, the problem is
not that we are fighting the drug war, as he put it, "without urgency,
without energy." It's that we are fighting it without logic, common
sense, morality, fairness, justice - and compassion.