Reviewed by Mark Blaine

The scary thing about Tulia, Texas, is how much it’s like so many towns across the country. It was caught between what everyone knew and what few—no one with any authority—would say. 

Tulia, perhaps, was eager to hear that it had a drug problem. Maybe that would explain the persistent malaise that had gripped the town. Maybe that was why things were changing, and not for the better. For Tom Coleman, Officer of the Year in Texas, it was easy to sell the idea in Tulia that more than 40 adults in the black community, one in five, were selling drugs and that these longtime neighbors, familiar faces all, should be locked up for decades.

At trial, it was Coleman’s word against the defendants’. He hadn’t videotaped or recorded any of the buys. He’d left vague notes of his investigation. He neglected to mention to his new bosses some of the trouble he’d been in before he showed up in Tulia. The district attorney and the judges lockstepped; most of the public defenders only limply defended their clients. One Tulian got 361 years.

But for a few attorneys, brave locals and Nate Blakeslee, the former editor of the Texas Observer who broke the story of this drug sting gone dreadfully wrong, the numbers didn’t add up. Where was the cocaine? If nearly everyone in town who was black and had some, if extremely remote, connection to drugs had been arrested, who were they selling it to? What about that charge against Coleman that he had stolen from one of the sheriff’s departments where he’d worked?

Blakeslee’s book is a thorough and engaging look at the problems with the war on drugs. He offers a chilling portrait of Tulia—it may be a familiar place if you’ve lived in a small town—and an even more chilling view of the hostile indifference toward the truth that many in the town, and many in power, held.