THE OTHER WAR

Mattie White remembers July 23, 1999, as the day her life was turned upside
down.

On that day in Tulia, Texas, White's 26-year-old son and 25-year-old
daughter were swept up in a drug bust that eventually resulted in the
arrests of 16 percent of the town's African-Americans--and a smattering of
Euro-Americans who were, coincidentally, involved in mixed-race relationships.

On the word of one white undercover cop with a shoddy work history and a
fondness for using the word "nigger," the bust eventually resulted in
forty-six indictments--and prison sentences that ranged from a few decades
to 431 years. In Tulia, these alleged "drug dealers" were all arrested
without drugs in their possession, but were indicted and paraded in front
of TV cameras because undercover officer Tom Coleman swore that he had
bought drugs from them. Coleman, for his part, had no other officers to
corroborate his purchases, nor detailed documentation of any kind.

Mattie White's children--and her white son-in-law--are now among the
thirteen people who remain in prison from those arrests. The three young
adults are serving ninety-nine-, sixty- and twenty-five-year prison
sentences, far away from the rural town of 5,000 that they call home. In a
July 29 column in the New York Times, Bob Herbert noted that "if these were
major cocaine dealers, as alleged, they were among the oddest in the US.
None of them had any money to speak of. And when they were arrested, they
didn't have any cocaine. No drugs, money or weapons were discovered during
the surprise roundup."

"Our goal is to have these sentences overturned," says Theodore Shaw,
associate director-counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund,
whose agency represents Mattie White's children in their postconviction
appeals. "If this is not a civil rights issue, then there are no civil
rights issues at this time.... The war on drugs has ended up being a war on
people of color."

Organized opposition to the drug war is no longer limited to the efforts of
more radically minded drug reform activists from the political extremes.

The chorus, as it were, is now made up of an unlikely coalition of
religious leaders, drug treatment experts, former addicts and prisoners,
academics, students and pundits from both the right and left--all of whom
decry the futility of mass incarceration as a tool for controlling the use
and abuse of drugs. Drug-war dissent is also growing among elected
officials like Representatives Barney Frank, Maxine Waters, Charles Rangel,
John Conyers and Ciro Rodriguez.

And while Congressional dissent continues to be largely in the purview of
progressive Democrats, Republican recognition of problems associated with
the nation's War on Drugs is growing steadily. In the past few weeks alone,
elected officials in law-and-order states--Kentucky, Oklahoma and
Virginia--have talked publicly of the need for early releases of nonviolent
prisoners, many of whom are drug offenders, in order to alleviate budget
deficits. Most other states are also facing severe fiscal strains because
of the exorbitant cost of running packed prison systems and the attendant
costs of healthcare, transportation, staff overtime and high staff turnover
among correctional officers.

Roughly half a million people of all ethnicities are now doing time for
drug-related offenses in state and federal prisons nationwide. Elderly
medical marijuana patients, college-age recreational drug users and
small-time suburban drug dealers have all been thrown into the mix. But the
burden of incarceration has unquestionably been borne by the poor, and
disproportionately so by poor people of color.

Contrary to popular misconception, drug use is roughly proportionate across
all ethnic groups. Yet it's a hard fact that more than three-fourths of the
men and women doing time in state prison systems across the country are
African-American or Latino. A May 2000 Human Rights Watch report,
Punishment and Prejudice, found that the rate at which African-American men
are sentenced to state prison for drug crimes is thirteen times greater
than the rate at which Euro-American men are sentenced for similar
offenses. The Bureau of Justice Statistics has further disclosed that one
in three African-American men aged 20-29 are now under some kind of
correctional supervision.