cannabisnews.com: Is This a Drug War or a Witch-Hunt





Is This a Drug War or a Witch-Hunt
Posted by FoM on October 10, 2000 at 10:44:28 PT
By Arianna Huffington
Source: Union-Tribune
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 African-American 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. One man with a previous drug conviction was given 435 years in prison; another got 99 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.As Miller wrote about Salem: "The human reality of what happens to millions is only for God to grasp; but what happens to individuals is another matter and within the range of mortal understanding." 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 morning 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. In fact, his word continued to be trusted by the prosecution after he perjured himself by testifying that he had never been charged with anything worse than a traffic violation -- and even after one of the black men he accused was able to produce an unassailable alibi.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, who referred to one of the trials as a "lynching.""There were moments," Miller wrote about Salem, "when an individual conscience was all that could keep the world from falling apart." In the Tulia case, Gardner's conscience led to the story breaking wide open. And 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, scheme and policy of targeting members of the African-American 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. A protest rally was held in front of the Texas state capitol, and the pressure is mounting on Gov. George W. Bush to take a stand.As Evan Smith, editor of Texas Monthly, told me: "There was a collective gasp in the state. Then again, this is a state in which James Byrd was dragged to death behind a pickup truck. Tulia is as much a story about race as how the drug war has gone crazy."On Friday, 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 backyard -- 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.Huffington can be reached via e-mail at: arianna ariannaonline.comSource: San Diego Union Tribune (CA)Author: Arianna HuffingtonPublished: October 10, 2000 Copyright: 2000 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.Contact: letters uniontrib.comAddress: PO Box 120191, San Diego, CA, 92112-0191Fax: (619) 293-1440Website: http://www.uniontrib.com/Forum: http://www.uniontrib.com/cgi-bin/WebXRelated Articles & Web Site:Arianna Onlinehttp://www.ariannaonline.com/ Drug Sting Raises Issue of Credibility http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread7213.shtmlTulia Drug-Bust Critics Taking Journey for Justicehttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread7183.shtmlCannabisNews Articles: Arianna Huffingtonhttp://cannabisnews.com/thcgi/search.pl?K=Arianna+Huffington
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Comment #4 posted by MZALIA on January 10, 2001 at 12:09:46 PT:
DRUG TREATMENT CZAR
January 10, 2001IT IS TIME TO SAY THE WORDS: DRUG TREATMENT CZAR. IMPLIED MEANS NOTHING, THE WORDS MUST BE UTTERED.AS THE BUSH FAMILY BEGINS TO FORM AT 1600 PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE, NW, WASHINGTON, DC 20500, IT IS WELL TO REMEMBER THAT THEY HAVE 'RECOVERED FROM A SEEMINGLESS HOPELESS STATE' IN THEIR COLLECTIVE LIFE HISTORIES. WHATEVER YOUR PERSUASION, I HOLD THAT DRUG TREATMENT WORKS, THAT BEING SOBER CAN PUT YOU IN POSITION TO LIVE AT 1600 PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE, NW, WASHINGTON, DC 20500.I APPLAUD RECOVERY. I APPLAUD ALL WHO HAVE SOUGHT TO BECOME FREE OF MOOD AND MIND ALTERING SUBSTANCES. JOIN THIS HUMAN RACE. LOBBY FOR A DRUG TREATMENT CZAR.
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Comment #3 posted by Ethan Russo, MD on October 10, 2000 at 13:20:49 PT:
Publicity, Finally
Thanks to Brad. I was wondering where the media was on this one. I had seen nothing on TV. This seemed to be an ideal "60 Minutes" topic. Even the average American Joe resents blatant discrimination and abuse of due process when he sees it. Maybe a few prosecutors should be disciplined or jailed for prosecutorial abuse. Maybe mainstream folks will get as sick of the War on Drugs as the cannabisnews.com aficionados. That would be worthwhile.
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Comment #2 posted by i_rule_ on October 10, 2000 at 12:49:27 PT
Cool, huh?
>From Brad Carter:Lots o' love,BradThe Friends of Justice held the most powerful event yet at the SwisherCounty Electric building in Tulia this evening. We absolutely packedtheplace. Alan Bean and I played guitars and lead a working-classcoalition ofchildren and adults in a barrage of freedom songs before a nationalaudience. The room rocked with the liberating sounds of "This Land isYourLand," "Let My People Go," and more . CNN and ABC were among theattendeestoo numerous to mention. Anybody that wasn't singing had a camera or anotepad. All the while, the phone rang with promises of financial supportfromacross the country. The FBI, Texas Rangers and local police were theretoprotect our guests. Between songs, Charles Kiker thanked the lawenforcement community for their efforts in maintaining a safeenvironmentfor our gathering and then delivered an emotion-charged tongue lashingtothe nation about the inhumanity of the drug war. The new civil rightsmovement is here; we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the drugwar.Brad Carter
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Comment #1 posted by observer on October 10, 2000 at 10:51:01 PT
A: A Witch-Hunt
Great article by Arianna!Like earlier processes of stigmatization and the discriminatory legislation based upon them -- such as those authorizing the persecution of witches and Jews -- statutes discriminating against psychiatric minorities are not imposed on an unwilling public by a few scheming tyrants. On the contrary, the people and their leaders feel equally caught up in an "irresistible" historical and social demand for certain kinds of "protective" laws. In every one of these situations, the leading crusaders, and the masses, whom, by turns, they appease, deceive, and dominate, have the same two-pronged explanation for their actions. First, they deny that the affected minority is seriously mistreated, and defend the "mild" repression they acknowledge by stressing the need for social protection from malefactors. Second, they proudly proclaim their aim to destroy the accused minority, and justify it on the grounds of self-defense against a diabolically dangerous and vastly powerful adversary bent on undermining the fabric of existing society. . .As for the so-called addict, he is the target of a major "war on addiction," fought by powerful troops on many fronts. In New York State, a new antiaddiction law, enacted in 1967, authorizes the incarceration, for up to five years, not only of proven addicts, but also of persons "in imminent danger of becoming dependent upon narcotics."3 This far-reaching repression of the addict is again justified on the grounds that addicts are "physically and emotionally sick ... [and] must be treated as if they were the victims of a contagious and virulent disease."4There is a fundamental similarity between the persecution of individuals who engage in consenting homosexual activity in private, or who ingest, inject, or smoke various substances that affect their feelings and thoughts -- and the traditional persecution of men for their religion, as Jews, or for their skin-color, as Negroes. What all of these persecutions have in common is that the victims are harassed by the majority not because they engage in overtly aggressive or destructive acts, like theft or murder, but because their conduct or appearance offends a group intolerant to and threatened by human differences.Thomas Szasz, The Manufacture of Madness, 1961, pp.208-209http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0815604610/ 
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