Spending time in Tulia raised questions with no easy answers. In a town where almost everybody knows everybody else, what drove jurors to dole out unbelievably harsh prison sentences to young men and women — some with no prior records —for penny-ante drug deals? And what does it say about the state of the nation's drug war that somebody like Tom Coleman was hired in the first place? "People don't understand," one former narcotics officer-turned-whistleblower told me. "Everybody's talking about Tom Coleman.... There are whole task forces of Tom Colemans out there."