TEXAS NEEDS A NEW APPROACH TO FIGHTING THE DRUG PROBLEM

As Halle Berry reportedly prepares for her role as a lawyer in an
upcoming movie about the infamous Tulia drug sting case and as dozens
of wrongfully convicted Tulians, now pardoned by the governor, plan
how to spend their winnings from a legal settlement, the Panhandle
Regional Narcotics Task Force appears to be reaching the end of its
era.

As part of a $5 million settlement, the city of Amarillo pulled out as
the sponsoring agency of the task force, which perpetrated the 1999
Tulia drug sting, where 39 people were falsely convicted on the word
of a lying undercover cop. Gov. Rick Perry pardoned the defendants
last year.

The settlement and Amarillo's pullout are good news, but the Panhandle
task force is only one of 45 such agencies in the state. Those task
forces have been operating for 17 years but haven't measurably
diminished drug availability in that time.

That's because they don't focus on big-time drug dealers or track
sales "up the ladder" to catch big importers. Instead, they rely
almost entirely on low-level undercover "buy busts" in minority
communities to generate arrests and on highway interdictions for asset
forfeiture opportunities.

As a result, about 90 percent of the drug arrests in Texas are for
mere possession. Those tactics are punishing drug addicts, not drug
dealers.

If he wanted, the governor could decide as early as January to spend
the federal grant money now going to the task forces on other
priorities - including drug courts, treatment programs, murder
investigations, gun-crime prosecutions, mentoring for children of
incarcerated parents and programs to stop domestic violence.

The state should quit throwing good money after bad and focus its
scarce resources on those more effective programs. Indeed, President
Bush has proposed, and the House Judiciary Committee already has
agreed, to slash the federal funds available for the task forces by
half. It is time for Texas to look for better solutions to the state's
drug addiction problems.

The Tulia case was just one of a series of infamous and intolerable
task force scandals across the state. Most could be traced to the
unsupervised nature of the multijurisdictional entities that report to
no elected official.

In 1998, then-Gov. George W. Bush denied funding to a task force in
the Permian Basin, his home region, after it was found to have set up
innocent people and mismanaged undercover investigations. Meanwhile,
officers in other task forces set up innocents, stole money and drugs
and protected drug dealers.

The task forces aren't the only way Texas conducts drug enforcement,
nor are they the most effective. Every city has a police department,
and every county has a sheriff, charged with enforcing drug laws.

Then there is the Texas Department of Public Safety, which has 400
narcotics officers whose job is to plug gaps in local enforcement -
not to mention the hundreds of federal drug enforcement agents who
work in this state as well.

Clearly, the drug war here would remain fully staffed even without the
regional narcotics task forces.

I hope the Tulia settlement will mark the beginning of the end for
Texas' drug task force system.

It is time to try new approaches.