The problem of excitation of the drift-tearing mode (Coppi, 1964) in high-temperature plasmas is considered. Existing theories predict that under the conditions typical of modern toroidal experiments on nuclear fusion, the mode is linearly stable in both collisionless (Coppi et al., 1979), and in a weakly collisional (Antonsen and Drake, 1983) regimes. We propose that the presence of a spectrum...